Do voters reward or punish incumbents for retrospective performance similarly in different democratic regimes? Despite debates on the merits of different regimes, little research has investigated the implications of constitutional design on voters' ability to hold politicians to account. This article shows that regime type determines the way and extent to which elections enable voters to reward or sanction incumbents. These regime effects are separate from and conceptually prior to factors previously identified in the literature on comparative economic voting. Analysis of elections from seventy-five countries reveals that, all else equal, voters have greater potential to hold incumbents to accounts under the separation of powers than under parliamentarism. Moreover, variables particular to separation of powers systems -the electoral cycle in pure presidential systems and instances of cohabitation in semi-presidential systems -affect the relative impact of the attribution of responsibility. The results contribute to ongoing debates about the relative advantages of different constitutional formats for democratic performance.The degree to which voters can hold elected officials to account is a central concern for democratic theory. Most empirical research on electoral accountability has explored a relatively limited set of established democracies, nearly all of which have parliamentary forms of government. However, the 'Third Wave' of democratization has dramatically increased the variety among the world's democratic systems. 1 As of 2002, of the seventy-five democracies with a population greater than one million, thirty-one were parliamentary, while twenty-five were presidential and nineteen were semi-presidential. This relatively new institutional diversity pushes us to re-examine enduring questions about democratic performance: how and to what extent does this variety affect voters' ability to hold governments accountable at the polls? Do particular institutional dynamics reduce or enhance the prospects for electoral accountability? More specifically, do voters reward or punish incumbent governments, presidents and legislators in parliamentary, presidential and semi-presidential systems similarly for retrospective performance, and to the same degree?Little research has explored this question across the world's democracies. This is surprising, for two reasons. First, controversy persists about the relative merits of different democratic regimes. Some of our most prominent scholars disparage presidentialism: for example, Lijphart argues that parliamentarism is superior in terms of the 'quality of
This article examines the role of global economic interdependence in constraining citizens' responses to domestic economic performance. While recent work in economic voting has made strides in accounting for the contextual mediators of support, analyses have not gone beyond domestic political structures. At the same time, students of globalization highlight the constraints governments face from the world economy but do not extend their analyses to examine the role of mass political behavior. This article brings these two research agendas together. Using cross-sectional individual-level data, it is found that accounting for exposure to the world economy dampens the strength of domestic economic bases of popular support. Additional analyses show that the susceptibility of different groups in society to the global economy's mediating influences is not uniform but contingent on occupational differences.The study of economic voting has produced one of the more successful research programs in the field of mass political behavior. The central proposition guiding the literature is confirmed again and again: when economic conditions are bad, citizens vote against the ruling party (Lewis-Beck 1991). Much work has been devoted to qualifying, refining, and reasserting this central finding. More recently cross-national work has breathed new life into the research program by considering the influence of political institutions on government accountability. It asserts that cross-national institutional differences-in party and electoral systems, cabinet composition, government partisanship-render the relationship between the economy and the vote much more complex than previously thought. However, despite this growing recognition for the importance of bringing in political structures, questions of variation in economic contextsinstitutional or otherwise-remain unasked.The absence of work on the influence of different economic regimes is noteworthy, especially given the rising attention, particularly in the popular literature ( Friedman 1999;Greider 1997), paid to the jarring effects of "globalization" on political and economic life. Do different levels of economic interdepen-I thank Phil Shively, Raymond Duvall, John Freeman, and the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this paper.
Conventional wisdom has it that political parties have incentives to respond to public opinion. It is also conventional wisdom that in open economies, policymakers must also "respond" to markets. Research on representation has provided ample evidence in support of the first claim. Research on the political economy of globalization has not, however, provided evidence for the second. This article examines the effects of globalization on how parties respond to voters. We argue that while elections motivate parties to respond to public sentiment, economic interdependence distracts political elites from their electorates and toward market actors, reducing party responsiveness to the mean voter. Evidence from a pair of distinct data sources spanning elections in twenty advanced capitalist democracies from the 1970s to 2010 shows that while parties have incentives to respond to left-right shifts in the mean voter position, they only do so when the national economy is sufficiently sheltered from the world economy. These findings have implications for party strategies, for representation, and for the broader effects of market integration.
In a seminal article, Cox (1990) suggested that electoral systems with larger district magnitudes provide incentives for parties to advocate more extreme policy positions. In this article, we put this proposition to the test. Informed by recent advances in spatial models of party competition, we introduce a design that embeds the effect of electoral rules in the utility function of voters. We then estimate the equilibrium location of parties as the weight voters attach to the expected distribution of seats and votes changes. Our model predicts that electoral rules affect large and small parties in different ways. We find centripetal effects only for parties that are favorably biased by electoral rules. By contrast, smaller parties see their vote share decline and are pushed toward more extreme equilibrium positions. Evidence from 13 parliamentary democracies supports model predictions. Along with testing the incentives provided by electoral rules, results carry implications for the strategies of vote-maximizing parties and for the role of small parties in multiparty competition.
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