A robust economy is widely assumed to bolster the popularity of the executive (e.g. Stegmaier et al. 2017). But this assumption ignores how the benefits of growth are distributed and the executive’s distributional policy positions. In this paper, we develop and test a theory that argues the degree to which economic growth translates into executive approval depends both on the distribution of economic gains and on whether this distribution matches the executive’s ideological (distributional) mandate.
Because policymakers’ perceived intentionality informs attributions of responsibility (Arceneaux 2006; Carlin and Singh 2015), outcomes that go beyond the government’s policy priorities should be less relevant for assessing the government’s competence than are outcomes that conform to that mandate and which were thus intentionally pursued. Conservative governments, for example, are unlikely to be held accountable for rising unemployment while leftist governments are not held accountable for fighting inflation (Hibbs 1977, 1982). We propose a similar dynamic for growth: while all governments prefer to grow the economy, leftist governments take office hoping to increase the income shares of the poor while rightist governments enter office hoping to increase the income shares of the rich (Ravallion 1997, 2001, 2004; Hanmer and Naschold 2000). Executives will then be most strongly rewarded for growth when the benefits are concentrated within their main constituency, matching their distributive mandates.
A test of our theory’s observable implications using an original dataset of quarterly measures of presidential approval in 18 Latin American countries supports our theoretical expectations. Results from time-series cross-sectional models show leftist leaders reap higher approval from economic growth under lower inequality conditions while rightist leaders only benefit from growth in more unequal contexts. Our findings point to a surprisingly sophisticated mass public that plays a key role in the fulfillment of the democratic bargain between political elites and masses.
