An ideal theory of voting under multi-level governance requires that citizens make responsibility attributions to moderate their retrospective policy voting. Scholars have shown that this process may be constrained by citizens’ cognitive capacities and by institutional arrangements. This paper shows that politicial variation also affects voters’ efforts to exert electoral accountability. Using panel surveys of Canadian voters in provincial and federal elections as well as qualitative media content analysis, I show that voters only live up to a federal theory of voting when governments make policy changes independent of the other level of government and the changes and their consequences are prominent in political and election discourse. The findings confirm that federal and multi-level institutions affect electoral accountability through the politics that they generate.
