Economic prosperity is the best recipe for an incumbent government to be re‐elected. However, the financial crisis was significantly more consequential for governing parties in young rather than in established democracies. This article introduces the age of democracy as a contextual explanation which moderates the degree to which citizens vote retrospectively. It shows a curvilinear effect of the age of democracy on retrospective economic voting. In a first stage after the transition to democracy, reform governments suffer from a general anti‐incumbency effect, unrelated to economic performance. In a second step, citizens in young democracies relate the legitimacy of democratic actors to their economic performance rather than to procedural rules, and connect economic outcomes closely to incumbent support. As democracies mature, actors profit from a reservoir of legitimacy, and retrospective voting declines. Empirically, these hypotheses are corroborated by data on vote change and economic performance in 59 democracies worldwide, over 25 years.

The public opinion–policy linkage has received scholarly attention for a long time. After all, this linkage is not only a key characteristic of democracy, but one of the most important aspects and quality criteria of a functioning representative democracy. Despite more than 50 years of political science research, there is still a lot of controversy about how the linkage between public opinion and policy actually works. Two related but distinct strands have formed in the literature—one focusing on responsiveness, the other on congruence. While both schools of thought are ultimately interested in the link between public opinion and representatives’ position or behavior they pursue two different strategies leading to confusion over the concepts and measurement in question. We provide a mutually exclusive conceptualization of congruence and responsiveness and structure the review of the extensive literature accordingly. In addition to providing greater theoretical coherence, our conceptualization fosters further development in the field by deliberately combining the two concepts with the research strands on public policy and representation. We conclude with a call for a more integrated research agenda and introduce a novel concept of “congruent responsiveness.”

Many ethnic minorities demand (adequate) descriptive representation in parliament because they expect it to affect the responsiveness of governments towards their demands. However, the mechanism of how minority representatives affect policy outcomes remains unclear. I argue that descriptive representation mainly has an effect if representatives possess additional leverage to influence policy outcomes. The argument is tested with hierarchical time-series models from 88 minority groups in 47 countries multiethnic democracies. The analysis shows that descriptive representatives are most successful in influencing policy outcomes if they are included in the government, the legislature is powerful, and a group is comparatively large.

Electoral systems provide distinctive accountability mechanisms in democratic polities and thereby affect government responsiveness to citizens. In this article, we concentrate on the effects of proportional vis‐à‐vis majoritarian electoral rules. We expect members of parliament to be more responsive under majoritarian rule, because these MPs have a direct mandate from their local constituency, are less dependent on their party, and can be held directly accountable by voters. We exploit Germany's mixed‐member system and test MP’s responsiveness using behavioral data generated within a two‐round field experiment. The experiment observes concrete interactions between voters and representatives. In the experiment, real voters sent emails about a policy issue to their MPs. We show that MPs who were elected via the majoritarian tier are almost twice as likely to respond to a voter request than MPs elected via PR. Our results deliver novel evidence that electoral institutions cause distinct behavioral responses from elected officials.

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