Political Accountability

2021

1. Political Accountability

   Nina McMurry, and Macartan Humphreys

   2021

   How do voters determine whether to re-elect a political representative? How do party elites make decisions about which candidates to nominate? A series of coordinated projects examine the question using experimental data as well as observational data on the careers of political actors.

2021

1. SCID

   When Do Strong Parties ’Throw the Bums Out’? Competition and Accountability in South African Candidate Nominations

   Evan Lieberman, Philip Martin, and Nina McMurry

   Studies in Comparative International Development, 2021

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   Existing accounts of centralized candidate selection argue that party elites tend to ignore constituent preferences in favor of internal party concerns, leading to accountability deficits. Yet this claim has been largely assumed rather than demonstrated. We provide the first detailed empirical analysis of the relationship between constituent opinion and candidate nominations in the absence of party primaries. We study contemporary South Africa, where conventional wisdom suggests that parties select candidates primarily on the basis of party loyalty. Analyzing more than 8000 local government councillor careers linked with public opinion data, we find that citizen approval predicts incumbent renomination and promotion in minimally competitive constituencies, and that this relationship becomes more pronounced with increasing levels of competition. By contrast, improvements in service provision do not predict career advancement. Under threat of electoral losses, South Africa’s centralized parties strategically remove unpopular incumbents to demonstrate responsiveness to constituent views. However, party-led accountability may not improve development.

   @article{mcmurry_scid_2021,
     author = {Lieberman, Evan and Martin, Philip and McMurry, Nina},
     title = {When Do Strong Parties 'Throw the Bums Out'? Competition and Accountability in South African Candidate Nominations},
     journal = {Studies in Comparative International Development},
     year = {2021},
     pages = {316--342},
     volume = {56},
     publisher = {Springer},
     status = {peer},
     proj = {account},
     keywords = {vertical linkages}
   }

2019

1. SciAdv

   Voter information campaigns and political accountability: Cumulative findings from a preregistered meta-analysis of coordinated trials

   Thad Dunning, Guy Grossman, Macartan Humphreys, and 8 more authors

   Science advances, 2019

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   Voters may be unable to hold politicians to account if they lack basic information about their representatives’ performance. Civil society groups and international donors therefore advocate using voter information campaigns to improve democratic accountability. Yet, are these campaigns effective? Limited replication, measurement heterogeneity, and publication biases may undermine the reliability of published research. We implemented a new approach to cumulative learning, coordinating the design of seven randomized controlled trials to be fielded in six countries by independent research teams. Uncommon for multisite trials in the social sciences, we jointly preregistered a meta-analysis of results in advance of seeing the data. We find no evidence overall that typical, nonpartisan voter information campaigns shape voter behavior, although exploratory and subgroup analyses suggest conditions under which informational campaigns could be more effective. Such null estimated effects are too seldom published, yet they can be critical for scientific progress and cumulative, policy-relevant learning.

   @article{metaketa_article_2019,
     author = {Dunning, Thad and Grossman, Guy and Humphreys, Macartan and Hyde, Susan D and McIntosh, Craig and Nellis, Gareth and Adida, Claire L and Arias, Eric and Bicalho, Clara and Boas, Taylor C and {others}},
     title = {Voter information campaigns and political accountability: Cumulative findings from a preregistered meta-analysis of coordinated trials},
     journal = {Science advances},
     year = {2019},
     number = {7},
     pages = {eaaw2612},
     volume = {5},
     publisher = {American Association for the Advancement of Science},
     doi = {https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aaw2612},
     url = {https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaw2612},
     status = {peer},
     proj = {account},
     keywords = {experimental, development, vertical linkages},
     proj.1 = {aggregation}
   }