The Behavioural and Attitudinal Consequences of missed Electoral Accountability: Evidence from a Regression Discontinuity Design

How does holding governments to account affect the political behaviour and attitudes of voters? Electoral accountability is a foundational element of representative democracies. Yet, recent empirical work questions the relevance of electoral accountability because voters often struggle to adequately punish governments for their performance, and because political parties in government may have little direct control over performance metrics. These findings call the relevance of electoral accountability into question. This paper advances this debate by analyzing the behavioural and attitudinal benefits of electoral accountability, even if citizens fail to adequately punish governments. I argue that when voters hold governments to account at the ballot box this has beneficial downstream effects on voters political behaviour and political attitudes. In order to provide a causal estimation of the effect of electoral accountability on voters' behaviour and attitudes I make use of a regression discontinuity design that leverages exogenous variation in the eligibility to vote. I combine this with voters' perception of government performance metrics.