Research on attribution of accountability in multi-level settings has identified clarity of responsibility created by institutional design, the degree of decentralization, and political knowledge or sophistication as important factors affecting a voter’s ability and propensity to blame or reward the ‘appropriate’ level of government for its performance. Some degree of breakdown in the attribution of responsibility—and the propensity to act on it—is closely related conceptually to ‘second order elections’, contests in which voters’ choices are often shaped by federal-level factors, due to the perceived lack of importance of the subnational electoral arena.
Drawing on individual-level data from the Canadian Provincial Election Study, covering provincial elections from seven Canadian provinces, this paper investigates the conditions that facilitate the attribution of responsibility by voters in a multi-level setting. Comparing across subnational jurisdictions of a highly decentralized federation (and one that is sometimes excluded as an outlier in cross-national comparisons of ‘second order’ elections) allows us to control for the degree of fiscal decentralization and the clarity of responsibility created by institutional design in order to assess the impact of attitudinal factors, which might be more variable than institutional factors across sub-national units. Specifically, the paper investigates the relationship between underlying attitudes toward levels of government in a multi-level setting and subsequent attribution of responsibility by voters in order to assess the role that these attitudes play in facilitating attribution of responsibility and better understand the mechanisms that affect the development of these attitudes. These include relative levels of trust in governmental institutions at the subnational and national levels, voters’ perceptions of political efficacy at each level and voters’ interest in government at each level.
