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相联系。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。特别是，该项目将审查两种机制，即学习机制和制裁机制，学习机制是选民利用过去的表现来表明政治家的基本特征，制裁机制是选民奖励表现好的政治家，惩罚表现差的政治家，通过这种机制可以实现问责制。这些观点中的每一种都导致了关于制度如何影响问责制的不同结论。因此，理解每种机制的独特作用及其相互作用，对民主治理的学术研究和制度设计都具有重要意义，以提高accountability.The理论分析将表明，制裁的标准观点是不完整的，在一个重要的意义上，它错误地描述了制裁是如何工作的。鉴于此，实验将测试的假设，在各种各样的自然模型的问责制，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如何以及何时发生，对政治学和决策者具有重要的广泛影响。在一些领域，如任期限制、地区规模和决策的透明度，政治问责制模式的政策含义取决于一个人是侧重于制裁还是学习。如果这两种机制实际上都在运作，现有的政策结论可能不正确或不完整。这项研究也提供了机会，以加强研究生的培训，通过参与建设，设计，实施和分析的实验。最后，收集到的实验数据将公开，以便其他研究人员能够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.