We examine whether and when voters in American states hold elected officials accountable for the results of fiscal policy decisions. Clear fiscal policy effects appear in both gubernatorial and legislative elections between 1968 and 1992, independent of the effects of incumbency, coattails, term limits, and macroeconomic conditions. The results show that voters expect Democrats to provide higher levels of taxes and spending relative to state economies. Net of these expectations, Republican gubernatorial candidates lose votes if their party is responsible for unanticipated increases in the size of the state budget, but Democrats do not, and indeed may be rewarded for small increases.Independent of this, the incumbent party is punished for failing to maintain fiscal balance, and accountability is generally stronger following a period of unified party control than under divided government. Taken together, these results show how electoral accountability for fiscal policy outcomes is strong but highly contingent on a complex configuration of party labels, partisan control, expectations, and institutions.

In all South African elections since 1994, race has been an overwhelming predictor of voting behavior for most of the South African electorate. This paper evaluates three explanations for this outcome: an expressive hypothesis, which sees voting as an act of identity expression; a politics-as-usual approach, which points to standard factors like policy preferences or performance evaluations; and a racial heuristics approach, which suggests that voters use race as a cognitive shortcut during elections. It finds that racial heuristics, combined with performance evaluations, provide the best explanation for South Africa's racial census.

Face-to-face interviews constitute a social interaction between interviewer and respondent, and in the African context, social interactions are strongly shaped by ethnicity. Yet research using African survey data typically fails to account for the effect of shared ethnicity on survey responses. We find that respondents give systematically different answers to coethnic and noncoethnic interviewers across surveys in 14 African countries, but with significant variation in the degree of bias across question types and types of noncoethnic dyads, with the largest effects occurring where both the respondent and interviewer are members of ethnic groups with a history of political competition and conflict, and where the respondent or interviewer shares an ethnicity with the head of state. Our findings have practical implications for consumers of African survey data and underscore the context dependence of the social interaction that constitutes the survey experience.

This article utilizes the statistical analysis of an original dataset of African legislative seat volatility levels and three case studies to demonstrate that the size and configuration of politically salient ethnic groups bear a strong relationship with patterns of legislative seat volatility in Africa. Legislative seat volatility is highest in countries where either no social group is large enough to form a majority on its own, or a majority group contains within itself a second smaller majority group; it is lowest in countries where one, and only one, group forms a majority. In contrast, most standard explanations for volatility, including variations in economic performance, democratic period of origin and democratic duration, do not appear relevant in the African context. While political scientists have long studied the number of parties in party systems, they have paid less attention to a different, but just as important, variable: electoral volatility. Electoral volatility -the total change in the percentage of seats or votes won or lost by all parties between elections -ranges widely between regions (older democracies in more developed regions tend to have lower volatility than new democracies in developing regions) and within regions (even amongst new democracies in the same region, volatility scores vary significantly). Too much volatility can generate uncertainty for voters, shorten the time horizons of parties and politicians, and force frequent renegotiations of legislative coalitions. 1 Too little volatility can create permanent winners and losers and give too much 'slack' to incumbents. 2 Important as volatility is to the health of party systems, however, our ideas about the causes of volatility remain underdeveloped. Recent work has advanced our understanding of several factors shaping volatility levels, including the age of the democracy, institutions and institutional change, economic performance, the time period in which the democracy came into being, and social factors such as the salience of class and ethnic divisions. 3 But much work remains to be done, particularly on

In the first three elections following Malawi's return to democracy in 1993, voting patterns displayed a clear ethno-regional pattern. Then in 2009 the regional pattern broke down in dramatic fashion, with the incumbent President, Bingu wa Mutharika, attracting majority support across all three regions. This article first examines whether ethnic identities were at the root of Malawi's ethno-regional electoral pattern. Our tests show that while ethnic identities were associated with partisan attachments in some areas, regional patterns were more consistently related to other factors, particularly views of the government's performance and the inclusiveness of the ruling party. We then examine the breakdown of the regional pattern, drawing on trend analysis of public opinion data from 1999 to 2008. We show that by 2009 the majority of Malawians in all three regions had come to hold positive views of Mutharika's performance and had come to see his government as inclusive. We conclude, therefore, that shifts in patterns of partisanship had more to do with political factors -Mutharika's symbolic and substantive policies during this first term -than ethnic identities. Malawi reminds us that incumbents, when faced with incentives to construct multi-ethnic support bases, can use the power of the state to reach out across ethnic political boundaries and re-order supposedly entrenched patterns of partisanship.