The policy-seeking voter: evaluations of government performance beyond the economy
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The policy‑seeking voter: evaluations of government performance beyond the economy Niels Markwat1 Received: 24 June 2020 / Accepted: 29 October 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Voters hold governments to account through elections, but which criteria are most important to voter evaluations of incumbent performance? While (economic) outcomes have long been central to studies of retrospective voting, recent studies have considered the influence of policy output—the policies implemented by incumbents to achieve their goals. Building on this promising development, this study identifies three ways in which policy output is expected to affect voter evaluations of incumbent performance—the congruence between implemented policy and (1) individual preferences; (2) public opinion; and (3) election pledges. A discrete choice experiment was designed to assess the relative importance of these three aspects of policy output in comparison to each other; as well as to two important economic indicators. Overall, the findings support the notion that policy output matters to voters even beyond outcomes. The findings also show that voters value congruence between policy and their personal preferences considerably more than policy congruence with public opinion; and election pledge fulfillment. This indicates that voters are egotropic in their evaluation of implemented policy, and more policy-seeking than accounted for in much of the empirical retrospective voting literature. These results inform our understanding of how policy output matters to voters, as well as of how voters hold governments accountable for their performance. Keywords Retrospective voting · Evaluations of government performance · Policy output · Election pledge fulfillment · Policy congruence · Discrete choice experiment
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s4354 5-020-00030-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Niels Markwat [email protected] 1
Department of Political Science, SOM Institute, University of Gothenburg, Sprängkullsgatan 19, 411 23 Göteborg, Sweden Vol.:(0123456789)
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Page 2 of 21
SN Soc Sci
(2021) 1:26
Introduction A central principle in most conceptions of representative democracy is that voters hold governments accountable through elections. The findings of a large number of studies on retrospective voting have provided empirical support for the principle that incumbents’ re-election is contingent upon voter evaluations of their tenures in office (see for overviews e.g., Ashworth 2012; Healy and Malhotra 2013). Therewith, voter evaluations of prior performance can be an important determinant of vote choice, even if it is by no means the only one. The focus of this study lies entirely on the retrospective component of a vote decision, namely the overall evaluation of an incumbent’s performance—namely, which performance criteria are most important to these evaluations? While most empirical studies to date have focused on the conside
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