Does Loyalty Influence Accountability? Economic Voting in Times of Crisis

In the light of the research on vertical accountability, poor economic performance of the state should result in punishment of the ruling party, followed by the change in power. In times of economic crisis this mechanism should be particularly evident, as recession affects everyone. Still, responsibility for economic failure is sometimes blurred, as some of national governments’ pre-crisis decisions are forced (and evaluated) by supranational organizations. This may lead to a weakening of the accountability mechanisms, vertical accountability in particular. Thus, the sense of current efforts, undertaken in European countries, aimed at an improvement of the mechanisms of horizontal and vertical accountability can be questioned. Although empirical findings confirm that the government is often perceived as responsible for the crisis and as accountable for its consequences, there is still a group of people (party identifiers) whose loyalty-driven behavior should be immune to short term factors, such as fluctuations in the economy. The question is, whether the party identification influence on voters’ behavior remains stable in economically turbulent times. The present paper has two main objectives. Firstly, we will analyze the impact of the economic crisis on vertical accountability measured as economic voting. Secondly, we are interested to know whether and how party identification influences these mechanisms; whether the economic crisis can trigger dealignment process. The above-mentioned analyses will be carried out on both theoretical and empirical level. In order to test our hypotheses, we chose two different cases: Poland and Spain. These two countries differ as far as the influence of crisis on the state economy is concerned.