J Elect Public Opin Parties 17(1):1–19, Carsey TM, Wright GC (1998) State and national factors in gubernatorial and senatorial elections. addition, constituents may hold members accountable for the collective actions of Congress (see Adler and Wilkerson 2012). While the direction of the effects is the same for all attributes, their magnitude differs substantially. All else equal, respondents choose the party with a more positive value for each included indicator of government performance—as expected.Footnote 8. Department of Political Science, SOM Institute, University of Gothenburg, Sprängkullsgatan 19, 411 23, Göteborg, Sweden, You can also search for this author in Citizen’s Heuristics and Democratic Accountability in Complex Governance, https://doi.org/10.1080/15309576.2016.1180306, How Do Politicians Attribute Bureaucratic Responsibility for Performance? Zone of Acceptance under Performance Measurement: Does Performance Information Affect Employee Acceptance of Management Authority? 2011). Polit Stud 65(4):860–876, Naurin E, Royed TJ, Thomson R (2019) Party mandates and democracy: making, breaking, and keeping election pledges in twelve countries. The use of a discrete choice experiment offered two tangible advantages to other methodologies for answering the questions posed in this study (see Hainmueller et al. The aim of this paper is to study how, and how much, incumbents’ policy output matters to voter evaluations of government performance. Cross-national and cross-individual variation in the salience of economic performance. 1 indicate that what voters care most about in policy output is that incumbents act in accordance with their preferences; much less that implemented policy corresponds to public opinion or previously made promises. Polit Behav 25(1):51–67, Fisher SD, Hobolt S (2010) Coalition government and electoral accountability. 2019), several robustness checks were conducted to further validate the direction of the observed effects, and in particular the relative importance of the competing attributes for respondents' evaluations of government performance. The performance evaluation should be focused on how well the Superintendent is making progress on the goals to achieve the district's vision of students graduating as college and career ready, productive, responsible, and engaged global citizens. Good performance on all included evaluation criteria is associated with better voter evaluations of government performance, while poor performance is associated with worse evaluations. With regard to other common concerns in the design of discrete choice experiments, attribute order was randomized per respondent to rule out the influence of ordering and primacy effects; and attribute orthogonality was achieved by design as no possible combinations of attribute values were excluded (see Hainmueller et al. As expected, voters attach value to different aspects of government performance. Comp Polit Stud 50(6):739–765, Fair RC (1978) The effect of economic events on votes for president. It is important to note that this study does not provide a full model of vote choice; only the retrospective aspect of a vote choice, namely the evaluation of government performance, is studied in this design. 1994; Naurin et al. In line with theories of mandate representation, the findings indicate that voters see obtaining favorable policy output itself as a form of performance, not as an—irrelevant—means to obtain favorable outcomes. Finally, policy congruence with individual preferences was incorporated as the congruence between implemented policy and the respondents’ own preferences. Basingstoke, Palgrave McMillan, Bengtsson Å, Wass H (2010) Styles of political representation: what do voters expect? Am J Polit Sci 58(3):579–592, Dahl RA (1991) Democracy and its critics. Am Polit Sci Rev 73(4):1071–1081, Pétry F, Duval D (2017) When heuristics go bad: citizens’ misevaluations of campaign pledge fulfilment. Despite the implicit assertion of much of the empirical literature that what voters care about in incumbent performance is outcomes, a compelling argument is to be made for the importance of policy output as well. Eur J Polit Res 50(1):1–23, Giuliani M, Massari SA (2019) The economic vote at the party level: electoral behaviour during the Great Recession. In addition, there is a possibility that voters would respond somewhat differently to more concrete or different performance information about an incumbent’s tenure in office. 2014; Healy et al. 2005; McDonald and Budge 2005; Elinder et al. As this study is primarily interested in determining which criteria voters find most important for evaluating incumbents, creating scenarios in which voters possess all important information is an elementary prerequisite. SN Soc Sci 1, 26 (2021). Electoral support for incumbents in six post-communist countries, https://doi.org/10.1080/13569775.2011.597144, Performance Measures and Democracy: Information Effects on Citizens in Field and Laboratory Experiments, Government Checking Government: How Performance Measures Expand Distributive Politics, https://doi.org/10.1017/S002238160999082X, Performance Measurement as a Political Discipline Mechanism. Working Paper. Our results therefore indicate that voters hold members of the majority party collectively accountable for budget gridlock to an extent that leaders of the party often cannot afford to ignore. This question is mostly asked in a supporting fashion to the understanding of the central dependent variable question, the choice task. A full description of the experiment can be found in the supplementary material (pp. This way, the standard errors did not need to be clustered on the respondent level, and the degrees of freedom available were plentiful. a one-dimensional policy space. J Polit 75(4):968–979, Bechtel MM, Hainmueller J (2011) How lasting is voter gratitude? These results inform our understanding of how policy output matters to voters, as well as of how voters hold governments accountable for their performance. Instead our findings suggest negativity bias in the relationship between performance and electoral support for incumbents. Annu Rev Polit Sci 16:285–306, Healy AJ, Persson M, Snowberg E (2017) Digging into the pocketbook: evidence on economic voting from income registry data matched to a voter survey. In line with the prevailing consensus in studies on economic voting, respondents found the development of the national economy and their personal finances of similar importance. Annu Rev Polit Sci 3:183–219, Matthieβ T (2020) Retrospective pledge voting: a comparative study of the electoral consequences of government parties’ pledge fulfilment. J Polit 73(2):316–330, Van der Eijk C, Franklin M, Demant F, Van der Brug W (2007) The endogenous economy: ‘real’ economic conditions, subjective economic evaluations and government support. The results of these analyses are presented in the supplementary material (pp. First, to determine how policy output matters to voter evaluations: are voter evaluations of government performance more affected by congruence of incumbents’ policy output to individual preferences; to public opinion; or to the incumbents’ election pledges? An empirical analysis. 2019b). No additional hypotheses were formulated with regard to the relative importance of the criteria, as compared to each other, to voter evaluations of government performance. This paper identifies three important values of democratic representation that policy output should appeal to in voters. While politicians face a decrease in vote share as a result of poor performance, they are less likely to see an increase in vote … Electoral Stud 50:116–127, Pitkin HF (1967) The concept of representation. 2019b; Matthieβ 2020; see also Healy and Malhotra 2013). We find evidence for a nonproportional, performance threshold hypothesis, which implies that voters’ behavior is affected by clear gradations of performance. Arguably, the aspects of incumbent performance that matter most to voters can be viewed as an extension of voters’ representational preferences (e.g., Carman 2007; Bengtsson and Wass 2010; Werner 2019). 2019b). The AMCE recorded for the policy congruence with individual preferences attribute is more than twice as big as the AMCE for pledge fulfillment; and more than triple the size of the AMCE for policy congruence with majority preferences. The most notable difference (see Supplementary Material, p. 12) was that when not forced to choose, and trade-off effects are thus of lesser importance, voters find economic outcomes and policy congruence with their preferences of approximate equal importance. 3 In races for Congress and the state legislature, the average incumbent ran for a seat where 45 percent of the constituents lived in territory that was not part of the incumbent’s old district. Electoral Stud 57:121–130, Duval D (2019) Ringing the alarm: the media coverage of the fulfillment of electoral pledges. The dataset generated and analyzed during the current study is available from the corresponding author on reasonable request. It is up to future research to determine whether partisanship and voter awareness impact the consideration of economic outcomes and policy output by voters in different ways. This way, the trade-offs underlying the respondents’ choice are also accounted for in the model. Region Federal Stud 29(3):307–327, Grossback LJ, Peterson DAM, Stimson JA (2005) Comparing competing theories on the causes of mandate perceptions. Polit Behav 37(4):865–887, Hogan RE (2008) Policy Responsiveness and incumbent reelection in state legislatures. Overall, the findings support the notion that policy output matters to voters even beyond outcomes. 2014; Born et al. Polit Commun 36(2):259–271, Kostadinova P (2017) Party pledges in the news: which election promises do the media report? Even if reliable estimates could have been obtained from earlier work, it would have been a tough sell to argue that such estimates would represent an equal or at least similar distribution of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ performance across attributes for all respondents. Running the same analysis with binary logistic regression (logit) produced similar results. These comparisons, however, have not typically included performance criteria pertaining to policy output (see also Healy and Malhotra 2013, p. 289). The link between government performance and support for incumbents is a key mechanism of accountable government. Figure 1 provides a visual overview of the change in predicted probabilities for various levels of disparity between party profiles, per attribute. This suggests that voters allocate limited discretionary freedom to incumbents to obtain desirable outcomes by any means necessary (see e.g., Fox and Shotts 2009). How Social and Historical Reference Points Affect Citizens’ Performance Evaluations, How electoral incentives shape performance measurement efforts, Financial control, blame avoidance and Radio Caroline: Talkin’ ‘bout my generation, Finding Exits and Voices: Albert Hirschman's Contribution to the Study of Public Services, https://doi.org/10.1080/10967494.2016.1141814, Citizen Expectations and Satisfaction in a Young Democracy: A Test of the Expectancy-Disconfirmation Model, Retrospective Voting in Korean Elections: Theories and the Reality, https://doi.org/10.20973/jofp.2017.7.1.35, Motivated Reasoning about Public Performance: An Experimental Study of How Citizens Judge the Affordable Care Act, Disruptive, Dynamic and Democratic? Oxford University Press, Oxford, Naurin E (2011) Election promises, party behaviour and voter perceptions. University of California Press, Berkeley, Ragusa JM, Tarpey M (2016) The geographies of economic voting in presidential and congressional elections. 2019b). These findings are in line with previous work that has argued for the importance of policy output to voters (e.g., Corazzini et al. Public Sector Performance and Politicians' Preferences for Reforms, Citizen feedback as a tool for continuous improvement in local bodies, https://doi.org/10.1108/IJPSM-01-2017-0010, Measuring Citizens Satisfaction From Public Sector Organizations in Greece: The Case of the Regional District of Xanthi, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70377-0_49, Responding to problems: actions are rewarded, regardless of the outcome, https://doi.org/10.1080/14719037.2017.1281998, Measurement equivalence in replications of experiments: when and why it matters and guidance on how to determine equivalence, https://doi.org/10.1080/14719037.2016.1210906, Citizen satisfaction under changing political leadership: The role of partisan motivated reasoning, Compared to What? First, in each election, an incumbent receives a lower vote share the more he supports his party. In: Przeworski A, Stokes SC, Manin B (eds) Democracy, accountability, and representation. 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