Electoral (Dis)-Connection: The Limits of Accountability in Weak Institutional Environments

Abstract

Conventional academic wisdom holds that the “carrot and stick” of re-election helps voters reign in poorly performing politicians. Empirical research suggests, however, that achieving electoral accountability is harder in practice than in theory.

Electoral accountability requires what Mayhew (1974) famously called the electoral connection: what links politicians to voters is their desire for reelection and their ability to secure it by performing well in office. Though political parties play a fundamental role in maintaining that connection, ensuring support for incumbents through partisan loyalty and incentivizing good performance, scholars know little about the impact on the electoral connection when party systems collapse.

Through a sub-national study of Peruvian mayoral politics, I show that where parties are weak, the electoral connection becomes vulnerable to breakdown unless institutions of governmental oversight are sufficiently strong. Using an original survey, conjoint experiment, qualitative interviews and analysis of electoral, administrative and census data, I document a set of empirical findings that suggest an electoral dis-connection in Peruvian politics: an incumbency disadvantage; voter rejection of the premise of re-election itself; and a preference for challengers even over incumbents who perform well.

I then present evidence for my argument that weak oversight explains the electoral connection breakdown. The persistent poor performance that ineffective oversight tends to generate leads voters to doubt politicians' intrinsic motivation. Voters also credit on-the-job learning with incumbents becoming better able to evade governmental controls in a subsequent term, with ineffective sanctions meaning they are more likely to act on their new knowledge. For incumbents, then, voters doubt both their internal drive to excel and the external constraints on their behavior if re-elected. The result is voter skepticism about the benefits of re-election and the potential performance of re-elected mayors, even for incumbents who performed well.

The consequences of an electoral dis-connection are severe, limiting accountability and weakening democracy more broadly. As the conclusion details, other countries with similarly weak parties and frail oversight institutions may be headed toward an electoral connection breakdown. The Peru case, then, offers insights about the drivers of the electoral dis-connection, its political consequences and ways it may be repaired.