How do Types of Electoral Accountability Affect Electoral Behaviour?

Electoral accountability is said to exist when voters can hold politicians to account, and reward or punish them. Volatility is a central aspect of voting behaviour primarily because it is the switchers who feed in mechanisms of accountability allowing for alterations in government (Dassonneville/Hooghe 2014). Volatility is frequently analysed at the aggregate level (Bartolini/Mair 1990; Tavits 2008). At the individual level instead we know relatively little (Kuhn 2009). The initial literature looked at volatility mainly through the lenses of social class and party identification (Lachat 2007). Studies then started examining two additional individual-level mechanisms. The economic voting literature has focused on retrospective voting and the electoral fortunes of incumbent parties. This literature examines policy accountability, that is, the extent to which citizens disappointed with the economic performance of a previously endorsed party punish it at the elections (Anderson 2007). A rival proposition is that people in a democratic society seek representation and they evaluate how well they see the institutions of government to be working (Dennis/Owen 2001). Analyses into representational accountability focus on satisfaction with democracy and anti-partyism feelings, and provide evidence that disappointed voters mainly abstain in subsequent elections (Gidengil et al. 2001). In this paper we examine the impact of policy accountability and representational accountability on voting behaviour simultaneously, by employing the categories of exit, voice, and loyalty (Hirshman 1970). We expect that different types of accountability elicit diverse responses but it is their interplay that best captures the complexity of vote choice. For instance, dissatisfaction with policy performance leads to voice support for another party only when not sustained by representation disappointment, otherwise it will likely lead to exit. We use the German Longitudinal Election Study, which includes three long-term panels conducted for the federal elections in 2002, 2005 and 2009.