Explaining electoral performance of incumbents in democracies

The paper examines electoral performance for incumbents in democratic regimes. I explore whether parties in government lose and win votes for the outcomes produced under their mandates. In other words, the work investigates whether electoral support for incumbents depends on key economic, social and political indicators. The study includes a total of 83 democracies from the 1950s to 2000. This paper is structured as follows. I first discuss the state of the discipline and I present the principal objectives of the research. Then I test three main hypotheses. First, electoral variations for ruling parties may not only depend on pure economic indicators, such as economic growth or inflation. Voters may also hold governments accountable for other policies. They may care about the role of the state in the economy, in particular the size of the state1. Second, right wing governments may be judged differently from left wing governments. Citizens may reward conservative parties for fostering economic freedom, and left wing parties for increasing the size of the state. Third, accountability may work differently in rich and poor democracies. Voters may be more demanding in rich democracies, or they may not be