Electoral Accountability in Complex Information Environments

How well does electoral accountability function in a dealigned and increasingly complex political environment? This paper looks to one of the elements of electoral dealignment – the instability in political parties (e.g., splinters, mergers, new parties). I argue that as parties transform repeatedly between elections, they reduce the quality and quantity of electoral information available to voters, with potential implications for voter ability to sanction correctly incumbents for their performance. After a party transformation has taken place, voters may intuit that prior information may no longer be a reliable indicator of the party's future performance and may become increasingly reluctant to rely on a party's record of governance in their electoral calculus. As a result, voters may be less willing to rely on retrospective evaluations of incumbents' governance record. I conduct two sets of analyses to test the empirical implications of my argument: at the micro level with survey data from the CSES; and at the country level with macroeconomic indicators. Controlling for variation in the clarity of responsibility of institutions, I find that electoral accountability is weaker where parties change repeatedly. Implicit in my argument is parties’ active role in the process of electoral accountability. Such room to maneuver is afforded to parties by the dealignment of partisan attachments and weakening electoral ties. Hence parties can resort to organizational and leadership changes. They may replace an unpopular leader, “hoping that a new face will win the favour of the voters” (Baekgaard & Jensen 2012, 135); or a faction of party members may abandon the party to compete independently in an attempt to distance itself from a poor record of governance. Therefore this paper affords parties the agency to influence voters’ electoral decision-making in an effort to sweep a poor record of governance under the rug.