It's About Time: Institutions, Election Timing, and the Economic Vote.

Abstract

The literature on constrained economic voting emphasizes how voters hold politicians less accountable for economic outcomes when those politicians have less control over policy (e.g., Duch & Stevenson, 2008; Hellwig 2008; Powell & Whitten, 1993). This literature, however, is based on the highly problematic assumption that elections are xed events that the aected politicians have no capacity to manipulate. This dissertation considers how our empirical expectations of accountability relationships change when election timing is fungible by parties both in and out of power. The dissertation shows that dierent types of elections result from variations in economic performance, and the capacity of both the prime minister and the opposition to call elections at will. Because the institutions that constrain or empower dierent actors in parliament to bring about elections covary with those typically used in clarity of responsibility arguments, the weak direct eects found in previous studies between institutions, economics, and election outcomes are better explained by the consideration of strategic politicians opportunistically timing elections. I show that the type of election mediates the eect of the economy on the retention of the prime minister in 19 parliamentary countries for elections between 1967 and 2010. The implications of the economic vote for democratic accountability are thrown into question, as the economy's primary eect on election outcomes is through the incentive for strategic politicians to call elections.