How Do Parliaments Affect Retrospective Voting After Technocratic-Led Governments?

In recent decades, technocratic-led governments have become a more common occurrence in Europe. In this paper, we investigate retrospective voting after technocratic-led governments. While voters are generally expected to hold political parties accountable for past performance to ensure democratic responsiveness, this expectation is challenged by the complexity of technocratic-led governments. In particular, the absence of a prime minister's party in technocratic-led governments removes a low-cost heuristic that helps voters to assign responsibility between governing parties. We therefore examine what informational cues voters rely on to vote retrospectively, even after technocratic-led governments. We hypothesise that parliamentary votes, speeches, or a simple seat-share in parliament heuristic may cue voters to assign responsibility for past performance to specific political parties. To test these expectations, we combine electoral surveys, parliamentary votes and speeches with data on technocrats. We then analyse to what extent voters attribute government performance, and direct retrospective voting, to political parties that frequently vote in support of government policies, express positive sentiment, or are among the largest parties in parliament. Our findings contribute to the study of technocratic representation, retrospective voting, and parliaments.