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Is the Relationship Between Political Responsibility and Electoral Accountability Causal, Adaptive and Policy-Specific?

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Abstract

Will voters hold an incumbent more electorally accountable for the quality of a policy outcome if the incumbent’s political responsibility for the underlying policy increases? To answer this question, this study exploits a reform of labor market regulation in Denmark that exogenously assigned more political responsibility for unemployment services to some municipal mayors. The study finds that in subsequent elections these mayors were held more electorally accountable for unemployment services, but not more accountable for other policy outcomes. This suggests that the relationship between political responsibility and electoral accountability is causal, adaptive and tied to specific policies. On balance, the electorate thus seems to be quite judicious when assigning electoral credit or blame, moderating the extent to which incumbents are held accountable for specific outcomes based on the extent to which these incumbents crafted and implemented the policies that shaped these outcomes.

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Notes

  1. Another set of studies have examined which psychological processes lead voters to attribute certain outcomes to incumbent politicians (e.g., Gomez and Wilson 2001; Tilley and Hobolt 2011). While this literature also examines responsibility in relation to retrospective voting, it does so in a very different way than the literature discussed here. As such, in this more psychological literature, responsibility is a subjective belief that voters hold, whereas in the literature described above, responsibility is an objective condition determined by the mix of political and economic institutions that characterize the nature of policy-making in a specific polity.

  2. It is not theoretically straightforward to predict which of these approaches voters will adopt. On the one hand, adopting a policy-specific strategy seems to be more rational if one simply wants to learn more about the incumbent’s competence (for evidence of this, see the appendix of Achen and Bartels (2016)). On the other hand, voters are often interested in employing heuristics and mental shortcuts (Downs 1957; Kuklinski et al. 2000). One such mental shortcut might be to link responsibility and accountability at an aggregate rather than at a policy-specific level.

  3. Too see this, note that if the relationship between centralization of responsibility and accountability is causal, then voters respond to changes in responsibility by holding incumbents more electorally accountable. If the relationship is policy-specific, then voters are more likely to shift their attention away from policy outcomes that incumbents have little responsibility for and towards outcomes that incumbents have more responsibility for. If the relationship is adaptive, then voters are more likely to act on the current distribution of political responsibility when holding incumbents accountable.

  4. Unemployment services constitute an important part of public service provision in Denmark, and Danish labor market policy has long been premised on the idea that the day-to-day interaction with the unemployed individual is important for reducing structural unemployment (Torfing 1999). This idea is mirrored in spending priorities. According to the OECD, expenditures towards unemployment services (i.e., active labor market policies) represented 1.82% of the Danish GDP in 2013 compared to just 0.23% in the United Kingdom (OECD 2014).

  5. These assumptions roughly correspond to the exclusion and independence (or exogeneity) assumptions laid out by Dunning (2012) and Gerber and Green (2012). Along with the assumption of non-interference between units, they constitute the central assumptions needed to draw causal inferences. We do not discuss the non-interference assumption in detail, because political responsibility could not spillover to neighboring municipalities.

  6. See Sect. S1 of the supplementary materials for some additional evidence of the fact that the reform did not have any important side effects.

  7. Interview with Jan Handeliowitz, former employee at the Ministry of Employment. Author’s translation.

  8. This conclusion is based on an examination of all newspaper stories mentioning the reform in the month following the announcement of the assignment of municipalities to early-implementer status in the three major Danish broadsheets (Jyllands Posten, Politiken and Berlingske).

  9. The 2005 survey differs in this respect as it is not stratified according to municipality.

  10. The survey item on unemployment services was not included in the 2013 survey. Therefore, I cannot measure electoral accountability for unemployment services in the 2013 election.

  11. Support for the mayoral party is used to measure support for the mayor because voters do not elect mayors directly in Denmark. Rather, they elect members of a city council, and the city council then appoints a mayor right after the election (Houlberg and Pedersen 2015). Municipal elections in Denmark are held every 4 years in November. The electoral system is proportional representation and most municipalities have a multi-party system that mirrors the national party system.

  12. In “Alternative Explanations and Potential Mechanisms” this assumption is discussed further and tested empirically (see also Sect. S8 of the supplementary materials).

  13. I also estimated a simpler logistic model, without any controls. The interaction estimate in this simple model is also statistically significant and of roughly the same size as the one presented in column one of Table 2.

  14. I adapt the models in one way, swapping the measure of support for the mayoral party at national elections for a measure of support for the regional/national government party/parties.

  15. In particular, elderly care only directly affects a certain target population (i.e., the elderly), similar to how unemployment services only affect the unemployed. Elderly care is also similar to unemployment services in that it is a public service consisting of direct contact with municipal employees.

  16. Section S7 of the supplementary materials analyzes the robustness of these results by running similar analyses for a number of other policy areas. Among the seven additional policies examined, there is not a single statistically significant difference between the treatment and control municipalities.

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Acknowledgements

For comments on previous drafts, I would like to thank Marc Andre Bodet, Thad Dunning, Michael Lewis-Beck, Gabriel Lenz, Peter Thisted Dinesen, Peter Bjerre Mortensen, Cecilia Mo, Kasper Møller Hansen, Asmus Leth Olsen, Richard Nadeau, Michael Sances, Søren Serritzlew and Rune Stubager. For their work in collecting the Danish Municipal Election surveys, I would like to thank Ulrik Kjær, Christian-Elmelund Præstekær and Jørgen Elklit. Replication files for this paper are available in the Political Behavior Dataverse (https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/polbehavior).

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  1. Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, Bartholins Allé 7, 8000, Aarhus C, Denmark

    Martin Vinæs Larsen

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Correspondence to Martin Vinæs Larsen.

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Larsen, M.V. Is the Relationship Between Political Responsibility and Electoral Accountability Causal, Adaptive and Policy-Specific?. Polit Behav 41, 1071–1098 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-018-9483-3

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