A correct electoral accountability is essential to control government’s performance in modern democracies, but there are some factors that can affect this accountability. For instance: information requirements, institutional elements, or the nature of vote as the only and simultaneous way to judge, etc. Other facts, related to the context, can also be decisive: terrorism is an example. It is commonly admitted that terrorism is an issue that usually goes in favor of conservative parties so, to some extent, it could be expected that a high terrorist threat could make some voters to give their ballot to whom they consider the most capable to deal with it instead of evaluating the government’s performance. There is another way in which terrorism can affect electoral accountability: Political parties can use certain strategies to manipulate public opinion, if context does not play in their favor, and thus escape a possible negative retrospective judgment. One possible strategy could be to introduce a winning dimension in the electoral debate, this could be terrorism.
If the electoral effects of international terrorism have been already studied in depth, especially in the United States, and up to a point in Spain, these attacks were to some extent isolated, so they were the effects. The question is what happens when these events lose their isolated character? This can be the Spanish case which has suffered from terrorism form the very beginning of his democracy. The aim of this paper is to evaluate to what extent not only the international terrorism, but also an endemic terrorism as it could be ETA, plays a role as a distortion factor of the electoral accountability in Spain, either by its direct consequences or by the instrumental use that parties do of it.
