Competitive elections create a relationship of formal accountability between policy makers and citizens. Recent theoretical work suggests that there are limits on how well this formal accountability links policy decisions to citizen preferences. In particular, incumbents' incentives are driven not by the voters' evaluation of the normative desirability of outcomes but by the outcome's information about the incumbent's type (e.g., competence or ideology). This review surveys both this body of theory and the robust empirical literature it has spawned. It concludes with a short discussion of ongoing work that attempts to integrate this theoretical perspective with a richer view of policy-making institutions.

We study the comparative statics of the incumbency advantage in a model of electoral selection and strategic challenger entry. The incumbency advantage arises in the model because, on average, incumbents have greater ability than challengers. This is true for two reasons: high-ability candidates are more likely to win election (electoral selection) and high-quality incumbents deter challengers (strategic challenger entry). We show that this quality-based incumbency advantage is expected to be greater for high visibility offices, in polities with relatively small partisan tides, in unpolarized electoral environments, and in electorates that are relatively balanced in their partisan preferences.

An important empirical literature evaluates whether voters are rational by examining how electoral outcomes respond to events outside the control of politicians, such as natural disasters or economic shocks. The argument is that rational voters should not base electoral decisions on such events, so evidence that these events affect electoral outcomes is evidence of voter irrationality. We show that such events can affect electoral outcomes, even if voters are rational and have instrumental preferences. The reason is that these events change voters' opportunities to learn new information about incumbents. Thus, identifying voter (ir)rationality requires more than just identifying the impact of exogenous shocks on electoral fortunes. Our analysis highlights systematic ways in which electoral fortunes are expected to change in response to events outside incumbents' control. Such results can inform empirical work attempting to identify voter (ir)rationality. theoretical literature assumes voter rationality and claims to provide insight into a variety of political phenomena. 1 If actual voter behavior dramatically diverges from the assumptions in those models, then there is reason to be skeptical about that research agenda. An important empirical literature attempts to assess whether voters are indeed rational, examining the response of electoral outcomes to exogenous shocks outside the control of politicians. 2 The idea is that, with rational voters, these shocks should not affect incumbents' electoral fortunes. Although several studies find that incumbent electoral fortunes are unaffected by exogenous

We analyze a model of legislative particularism to understand how the provision of constituency service responds to variations in institutional and electoral environments. We show that increased partisan balance in the electorate, single-member districts, and independent executives all increase incentives for legislators to provide constituency service. The results of the model are consistent with existing comparative-institutional empirical observations. Moreover, the model addresses over time trends in the United States that are not explained by existing models and yields novel hypotheses that are amenable to empirical evaluation. changes in constituency service under two types of institutional variation: single-member versus multimember districts and presidential versus parliamentary systems. While the model clearly omits important determinants of constituency service (e.g., parties), the comparative statics are broadly consistent with a variety of empirical trends and the model yields several testable hypotheses.In our model, legislators invest resources in constituency service to enhance their reelection probabilities. The amount of constituency service provided is determined by two factors: a legislator's ability and the resources she invests. Voters consider two things when voting: the policy preferences of their legislator and her ability to provide both constituency service and global public goods. 1 All else equal, voters prefer highability representatives, but they receive only a noisy signal of ability by observing the constituency service provided to the district. Politicians expend scarce resources in order to convince the voters, through high levels of constituency service, that they are of high ability. Voters, in choosing a candidate, have to balance their policy preferences and their assessments of the candidates' abilities. The comparative statics investigate how different institutional and electoral

A long research tradition in behavioral political science evaluates the performance of democracy by examining voter competence. This literature got its start arguing that voters' lack of information undermines a defense of democracy rooted in electoral accountability. A more recent literature deepens the debate, with some authors claiming that voters effectively use cues to substitute for information about candidates and policies, and other authors claiming that voters are insufficiently rational to do so. We argue that, regardless of its conclusions about voter competence, this literature's single-minded focus on voter behavior is misguided. We use a sequence of formal models to show that traditional intuitions are incomplete because they ignore the effect that changes in voter behavior have on the equilibrium behavior of politicians. When this strategic interaction is taken into account, increases in voter information or voter rationality sometimes make democratic performance better and sometimes make democratic performance worse. One simply cannot assess the implications of voter characteristics for democratic performance without also studying how those characteristics affect the behavior of politicians.A nxiety about the competence of voters is a longstanding theme of behavioral political science. At its heart, this literature is a debate over a proposition aptly summarized by Lupia and McCubbins (1998):It is widely believed that there is a mismatch between the requirements of democracy and most people's ability to meet these requirements. If this mismatch is too prevalent, then effective self-governance is impossible. The democratic dilemma is that the people who are called upon to make reasoned choices may not be capable of doing so. [p. 1, emphasis in original] This multifaceted debate revolves around a series of questions about voters' ability to perform their democratic function. Are voters sufficiently well informed? 1 Is the information voters do have sufficient to allow them to behave as if they were well informed? 2 Do voters respond to the right kinds of information? 3 We argue that this debate's single-minded focus on voter behavior is misguided. Elections affect democratic performance through the interaction of politicians and voters. 4 As such, facts about voter behavior, whether "positive" or "negative," on their own, are . 4 Throughout we will equate democratic performance with voter welfare. There are, of course, important non-welfarist normative arguments for democracy. We adopt this normative approach because it is in keeping with the arguments in the behavior literature we are responding to. not informative about whether a democratic system performs well or poorly.We consider a series of models that show just how important this interaction can be. 5 In our models, increased voter information sometimes improves democratic performance and sometimes makes democratic performance worse. Likewise, some forms of voter irrationality improve democratic performance and some forms of voter irrat...