Collaborative Research on the Nature of Electoral Accountability

分析民主治理的一个基本问题是，政治家的表现如何与选民的决定联系起来。这项建议要求支持对这种选举问责制进行理论和实验研究。该项目将特别审查两种机制，即学习机制，即选民利用过去的表现作为政治家潜在特征的指示，以及制裁机制，即选民奖励表现良好的政治家，惩罚表现不佳的政治家，通过这种机制可以实现问责制。关于制度如何影响问责制，每种观点都得出了不同的结论。因此，理解每一种机制的独特作用及其相互作用，对于民主治理的学术研究和改善问责制的制度设计都具有重要意义。理论分析将表明，制裁的标准观点是不完整的——在一个重要意义上，它错误地描述了制裁的运作方式。鉴于此，这些实验将检验这样一种假设，即在各种各样的问责制自然模型中，制裁和学习同时运作，学习可以主导制裁。该项目描述了这种情况发生的方式和时间。这个项目对政治科学和政策制定者有着重要而广泛的影响。在许多领域，如任期限制、地区规模和决策透明度，政治问责模式的政策影响取决于一个人关注的是制裁还是学习。如果这两种机制实际上都在运作，现有的政策结论可能是不正确或不完整的。本研究亦提供机会，透过参与实验的建构、设计、实施及分析，加强对研究生的训练。最后，收集的实验数据将公开，以便其他研究人员可以进一步探讨与选举问责制有关的问题。

A fundamental question in the analysis of democratic governance is how the performance of politicians is linked to voters' decisions. This proposal requests support for theoretical and experimental research on such electoral accountability. In particular, the project will examine two mechanisms, learning, where voters use past performance as an indication of politicians' underlying characteristics, and sanctioning, where voters reward politicians for good performance and punish them for poor performance, by which accountability can be achieved. Each of these views leads to distinct conclusions about how institutions affect accountability. As such, understanding each mechanism's distinct role and their interaction has important implications both for the scholarly study of democratic governance and for the design of institutions to improve accountability.The theoretical analysis will show that the standard view of sanctioning is incomplete-in an important sense, it mischaracterizes how sanctioning works. Given this, the experiments will test the hypothesis that in a wide variety of natural models of accountability, sanctioning and learning operate simultaneously and that learning can dominate sanctioning. The project characterizes how and when that occurs.This project has important broader impacts for political science and for policy makers. There are a number of areas, such as term limits, district magnitude, and transparency of policy-making, where the policy implications of models of political accountability depend on whether one focuses on sanctioning or learning. If both mechanisms are actually operative, existing policy conclusions may be incorrect or incomplete. This research also provides opportunities to enhance the training of graduate students through involvement in the construction, design, implementation, and analysis of experiments. Finally, the experimental data collected will be made publicly available so that other researchers can explore further questions related to electoral accountability.