Electoral Accountability in Candidate-Centered Electoral Systems: A Cross-national and Longitudinal Analysis of Incumbent Parties’ Performance

Much scholarly attention has been given to the extent to which the electorate rewards or punishes a government for its past actions. A variety of long-term institutional factors have been proposed to explain gains and losses of incumbent governing parties. Institutions that allow for greater clarity of responsibility have been demonstrated to enhance the prospects for electoral accountability. However, a dimension that has been neglected in these cross-national studies is the degree of personalization of an electoral system. Has the accountability mechanism changed in contexts characterized by greater personalization of electoral choice? The aim of this study is to examine the propensity to reward or punish incumbents in candidate-centered electoral systems over time. In systems where people vote for individual candidates, as opposed to party lists, citizen-party linkages to greater extent rest on personal representation and to lesser extent on party-dominated representation. The dependent variable is the gains or losses of incumbent governing parties by comparison with the previous election. On the independent side of the equation, ballot structure and district magnitude interact to shape the incentives to cultivate a personal vote at the district level. Cross-sectional time series data for OECD countries since the 1960s will be analyzed.