State Economies and State Taxes: Do Voters Hold Governors Accountable?

Niemi, Richard G.; Stanley, Harold W.; Vogel, Ronald J.

doi:10.2307/2111664

Cited by 167 publications

(136 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…Niemi, Stanley, and Vogel (1995) and Lowry, Alt, and Ferree (1998) find that voters hold U.S. governors to account for the level of state taxes, although the evidence is not clear cut (Glaser and Hildreth 1996). Martinussen (2004) finds support for local economic and fiscal voting in Norway.…”

Section: Theories Of Performance and Support For Elected Incumbentsmentioning

confidence: 98%

Democracy and Government Performance: Holding Incumbents Accountable in English Local Governments

Boyne¹,

James²,

John³

et al. 2009

The Journal of Politics

151

115

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The link between government performance and support for incumbents is a key mechanism of accountable government. We model the vote share of incumbent administrations in local government as proportional and nonproportional responses to public service performance. We evaluate the models using a panel data set covering performance and elections from 2001 to 2007 in English local governments where an incumbent party or coalition was up for reelection. We control for the previous vote, whether the incumbent administration is of the national governing party, and local economic conditions. We find evidence for a nonproportional, performance threshold hypothesis, which implies that voters' behavior is affected by clear gradations of performance. Only the difference between low performance and at least mediocre performance matters. There is no reward for high performance. Instead our findings suggest negativity bias in the relationship between performance and electoral support for incumbents.

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Section: Theories Of Performance and Support For Elected Incumbentsmentioning

confidence: 98%

Democracy and Government Performance: Holding Incumbents Accountable in English Local Governments

Boyne¹,

James²,

John³

et al. 2009

The Journal of Politics

151

115

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Research on the US (Lowry, Alt, and Feree 1998;Niemi, Stanley, and Vogel 1995) finds the voters hold governors to account for the level of state taxes, although the evidence is not clear-cut (Glaser and Hildreth 1996). Martinussen (2004) finds support for local economic and fiscal voting in Norway.…”

Section: Modeling the Impact Of The Cpa Performance Information Regimementioning

confidence: 99%

Public Management at the Ballot Box: Performance Information and Electoral Support for Incumbent English Local Governments

James

John

2006

Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory

158

128

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Publishing performance information about local public services, an increasing trend in many Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, matters politically because it has an effect on incumbent local governments' electoral support. Voters are able to use performance information to punish or reward incumbents in the elections that follow their publication, which may fill a gap in the chain of accountability between voters and governments. We model the introduction of published Comprehensive Performance Assessments of local authorities in England, which make summary information about performance available to voters, as a ''shock'' to the relationship between voters and incumbents. Controlling for an unpublicized measure of performance change over time, change in the local tax level, change in local economic conditions, and whether the local incumbent is the party of the incumbent government at the national level, we find negativity bias. Incumbents in local authorities in the ''poor'' performance category experience a substantial reduction in aggregate vote share at the election following publication, but there is no similarly sized reward for those in the highest performance category.This article examines the political consequences of the publication of information about the performance of local public services, focusing on change in electoral support for incumbent local governments. The topic is important because much of the effective practice of a democracy depends on the existence of a link between the citizens and decisions taken by public bureaucracies in their name (Jones and McDermott 2004;Key 1966;Ranney 1954). If citizens attempt to update their views of an incumbent government with information about how well it is running the services and activities under its control, they need accurate information to make judgments about the agents who are supposed to be doing their bidding. Policy makers in many Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries have made considerable investment in performance measurement systems in

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“…Table 1 summarizes the results of several influential studies; the inconsistency is striking. Some studies have found that state economic variables affect gubernatorial approval (Atkeson and Partin 1995;Jacobson 2006;Niemi et al 1995); others have found that they do not (Crew and Weiher 1996;Peltzman 1987); and still others have found the effect to be contingent on some other factor (Ebeid and Rodden 2006;Leyden and Borrelli 1995;Stein 1990). These inconsistencies may arise from a widespread but implicit assumption that if local conditions matter, all voters will objectively take equal account (or non-account) of them when evaluating the governor-an assumption at serious odds with the work on partisanship and bias referenced above.…”

Section: A Theory Of Partisan Bias and Divided Federalismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Are Governors Responsible for the State Economy? Partisanship, Blame, and Divided Federalism

Brown

2010

The Journal of Politics

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Abstract:In the United States, voters directly elect dozens of politicians: Presidents, governors, legislators, mayors, and so on. How do voters decide which politician to blame for which policy outcomes? Previous research on gubernatorial approval has suggested that voters divide policy blame between governors and the president based on each office's "functional responsibilities"-requiring that responsibilities are clearcut, which is seldom true. Using data from four surveys, I show that voters actually divide responsibility for economic conditions in a partisan manner, preferring to blame officials from the opposing party when problems arise. However, this sort of argument fails to account for the powerful and well-documented role that partisanship plays in structuring American voters' behavior. My argument, detailed below, is that Americans rely heavily on partisan shortcuts when deciding whether to hold their governor (as opposed to the president) responsible for state-level policy outcomes-especially when functional responsibility for a particular policy area is shared by both the governor and the president. Of course, it's far from novel to suggest that partisanship matters in American politics; previous research has shown abundantly that voters tend to have more patience with politicians of their own party than with politicians from the other side. My major claim is not just that partisanship matters, then, but rather that partisanship helps determine which policy results get attributed to the governor and which get attributed to the president. Previous work on gubernatorial elections has erred by emphasizing functional responsibility without also taking account of partisanship.To be clear, I do not intend to argue that voters will completely ignore the president's and governor's actual functional responsibilities; even the least engaged citizen should know that governors have as little control over foreign policy as presidents have over potholes. Rather, my argument is that partisan considerations will influence allocations of blame in the many policy areas where the president and the governor share responsibility-an argument I test by analyzing responsibility for the state's economy. When the president and the governor belong to the same party, there is not much opportunity for a partisan blame game to develop between them. But when they belong to different parties, a situation I refer to as "divided federalism," partisan voters gain the opportunity to blame one for economic problems while giving the other a free pass. Just as divided government creates a potential blame game between the president and Congress, divided federalism creates a similar situation between the president and the governors. I proceed now by briefly reviewing the two main literatures I draw on-the literatures on partisan bias and on gubernatorial elections-and show how the latter can benefit by incorporating insights from the former. I then explore three specific empirical implications of this theoretical argument.

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State Economies and State Taxes: Do Voters Hold Governors Accountable?

Cited by 167 publications

References 25 publications

Democracy and Government Performance: Holding Incumbents Accountable in English Local Governments

Democracy and Government Performance: Holding Incumbents Accountable in English Local Governments

Public Management at the Ballot Box: Performance Information and Electoral Support for Incumbent English Local Governments

Are Governors Responsible for the State Economy? Partisanship, Blame, and Divided Federalism

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