Political Sophistication, Attribution of Responsibility and Economic Accountability

Are more politically sophisticated voters better able to assign responsibility for economic performance? Are they more/less biased in their evaluations of the economy? The proposed paper will explore these questions in the five countries covered by the Making Electoral Democracy Work project. The paper will use electoral surveys that were administered in each of the participating countries, both in national and subnational electoral contests. Beyond exploring the phenomenon at the individual-level, the design of the study will enable us to control for institutional-level factors such as clarity of responsibility. The paper will contribute to current scholarship on the topic by comparatively exploring dimensions of the phenomenon that have been mostly confined to the study of the American electorate.