Does Responsibility Matter? The Conditionality of Performance-based Political Support

A key component of democratic accountability is that citizens punish and reward the incumbent government on the basis of their past performance. Yet, over the past decades, western democracies have increasingly moved to a more multilevel governance structure with shared responsibilities on different levels. Accordingly, the punishment-reward mechanism becomes much more complex when it is no longer clear which level of government is responsible for which policy. Recent findings on the relationship between performance evaluations and political support are mixed or even contradictory. What are the necessary conditions for democratic accountability in complex multilevel governments? This article researches whether and how responsibility matters for performance-based political support. In doing so, it builds on two strands of literature. Firstly, it specifies the evaluative model that is dominant in the literature on political support and tests its conditionality on perceptions of responsibility held by citizens. Secondly, it extends the clarity of responsibility argument dominant in the economic voting literature by testing the influence of both horizontal and vertical clarity of responsibility (i.e. degrees of multilevel governance) on the reward-punishment mechanism. Using data from the European Election Studies 2009, this article employs a variety of analytical techniques, including Hierarchical Linear Modeling and an innovative application of the unified “within-between Random Effects” (REWB) framework (Bartels 2015; Bell and Jones 2015). The results show that performance-based support is conditional on both the perceptions of responsibility and on the institutional clarity of responsibility. It is the first paper to simultaneously take into account horizontal and vertical clarity of responsibility, and to model perceptions of responsibility between and within individuals. In doing so, it provides more crucial evidence for an evaluative mechanism underlying political support.