Experiments on Political Reputations and Democratic Accountability
Do elections induce politicians to act in the interests of voters? Democratic accountability is possible if voters reward politicians for good outcomes and punish them for bad ones. However, if voters are forward-looking but uncertain about politicians’ unobservable characteristics, politicians will often have strategic incentives to develop reputations at the expense of voter interests. I conduct laboratory experiments to test rational choice predictions concerning the conditions under which elections provide such perverse reputational incentives. In contrast to the game theoretic predictions, in the first experiment I find a strong behavioral tendency for voters to hold politicians accountable. In the second experiment I find that politicians fail to maximize the probability of election by taking advantage of their reputations and instead pursue their policy goals even though re-election is more valuable (by design). The results pose a challenge for theories that emphasize electoral selection and voter learning.
Dr. Woon is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh in the Department of Political Science. You can learn more about his research at http://www.pitt.edu/~woon/
