Does partisanship hurt electoral accountability?: Individual-level and aggregate-level comparisons of western and postcommunist democracies

Abstract

While the negative effect of partisanship on electoral accountability has been assumed in established Western democracies, its empirical test has been rare, especially for postcommunist democracies whose democratization processes are so distinct that their partisanship might deliver different political impacts from their Western counterparts. Through individual- and aggregate-level regressions, I find that partisanship, in general, does hurt electoral accountability at both levels. From a comparative perspective, the individual-level tests reveal that such a negative effect of partisanship has been more salient among the postcommunist voters with fewer electoral resources to rely on than among the Western voters whose abilities to hold the government accountable are stronger. At the aggregate level, however, this tendency becomes reversed as any increase in partisanship beyond its current relatively high level may induce the overinstitutionalization of the Western party systems restricting electoral accountability, while it could rather help to stabilize the postcommunist party systems making it easier for voters to discern which political group is accountable for policy outcomes.