Democracy and government performance: holding incumbents accountable in English local governments

Boyne, George Alexander, James, Oliver, John, Peter and Petrovsky, Nicolai 2009. Democracy and government performance: holding incumbents accountable in English local governments. The Journal of Politics 71 (04) , pp. 1273-1284. 10.1017/S0022381609990089

Full text not available from this repository.

Abstract

The link between government performance and support for incumbents is a key mechanism of accountable government. We model the vote share of incumbent administrations in local government as proportional and nonproportional responses to public service performance. We evaluate the models using a panel data set covering performance and elections from 2001 to 2007 in English local governments where an incumbent party or coalition was up for reelection. We control for the previous vote, whether the incumbent administration is of the national governing party, and local economic conditions. We find evidence for a nonproportional, performance threshold hypothesis, which implies that voters’ behavior is affected by clear gradations of performance. Only the difference between low performance and at least mediocre performance matters. There is no reward for high performance. Instead our findings suggest negativity bias in the relationship between performance and electoral support for incumbents.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Business (Including Economics)
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General) H Social Sciences > HA Statistics J Political Science > JS Local government Municipal government
Uncontrolled Keywords:	government performance; incumbent administration; proportional; nonproportional responses; English local governments
Publisher:	Southern Political Science Association
ISSN:	0022-3816
Last Modified:	08 Jan 2020 03:56
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/22658

Citation Data

Cited 132 times in Scopus. View in Scopus. Powered By Scopus® Data

Actions (repository staff only)

Edit Item