Performance voting and democratic accountability: Does the electorate use its vote to punish and reward political parties?

This study proposes a new model to investigate whether voters hold governments accountable by voting according to their retrospective evaluations of government’s performance. While most previous aggregate-level studies towards this theory explicitly model the dynamism the reward-punishment hypothesis implies (i.e. whether voters switch between an incumbent and an opposition party or vice versa), most individual-level research so far models measures of satisfaction on vote for an incumbent or not. While this provides insight in the effect of satisfaction on the vote, it does not show the reward-punishment hypothesis. This study argues that including the previous party choice makes individual-level models of performance voting analogous to the lagged dependent variable used in most aggregate-level research. The results endorse the theory of performance voting, but reveal that model misspecification caused by excluding the previous party choice as a control leads to substantial overestimation of the impact of satisfaction on the party choice.status: publishe