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Retrospective voting and party support at elections: credit and blame for government and opposition
[journal article]
Abstract Retrospective voting is arguably one of the most important mechanisms of representative democracy, and whether or not the public holds the government accountable for its policy performance has been extensively studied. In this paper, we test whether retrospective voting extends to parties in the opp... view more
Retrospective voting is arguably one of the most important mechanisms of representative democracy, and whether or not the public holds the government accountable for its policy performance has been extensively studied. In this paper, we test whether retrospective voting extends to parties in the opposition, that is whether and how parties’ past performance evaluations affect their vote, regardless of whether they were in government or in opposition. Taking advantage of a rich set of questions embedded in a representative German national elections panel, we update our knowledge on the retrospective voting mechanism by modeling retrospective voting at the party level. The findings indicate that the incumbent status is not the only criterion for retrospective voting, ultimately suggesting that both government and opposition parties can expect credit and blame for their conduct and this should provide some impetus for responsive performance of all parties.... view less
Keywords
voting behavior; representative democracy; responsibility; election; voter; government; party in power; opposition; party; representative; election to the Bundestag; Christian Democratic Union; Christian Social Union; Free Democratic Party; Social Democratic Party of Germany; Alliance 90/ The Greens; The Left; election research; multi-party system; Federal Republic of Germany
Classification
Political Process, Elections, Political Sociology, Political Culture
Free Keywords
German Longitudinal Election Study, Component 8 (GLES) (2009-2017)
Document language
English
Publication Year
2017
Page/Pages
p. 156-171
Journal
Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties, 27 (2017) 2
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1080/17457289.2016.1243543
ISSN
1745-7297
Status
Published Version; peer reviewed