Disentangling Accountability and Competence in Elections: Evidence from U.S. Term Limits

By James E. Alt, Ethan BUENO DE MESQUITA, Shanna Rose. 2011

262 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We exploit variation in U.S. gubernatorial term limits across states and time to empirically estimate two separate effects of elections on government performance. Holding tenure in office constant, differences in performance by reelection-eligible and term-limited incumbents identify an accountability effect: reelection-eligible governors have greater incentives to exert costly effort on behalf of voters. Holding term-limit status constant, differences in performance by incumbents in different terms identify a competence effect: later-term incumbents are more likely to be competent both because they have survived reelection and because they have experience in office. We show that economic growth is higher and taxes, spending, and borrowing costs are lower under reelection-eligible incumbents than under term-limited incumbents (accountability), and under reelected incumbents than under first-term incumbents (competence), all else equal. In addition to improving our understanding of the role of elections in...

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Political Science and International Relations

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3e922b27d7323a2f1f010c464cc0dd147a5bcd68

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Citations in the corpus

Is Voter Competence Good for Voters?: Information, Rationality, and Democratic Performance (2014, background): “…doesn’t get all the way to an encompassing measure of democratic performance, but unpacks the extent to which the welfare effects of elections operate through incentives versus selection of good types (Alt, Bueno de Mesquita and Rose 2011; Gagliarducci and Nannicini 2013; Gordon and Huber 2007).”
Monitoring Corruptible Politicians (2016, background): “Alt et al. (2011) use variation in gubernatorial term limits across U.S. states to identify sanctioning and selection effects in fiscal policy.”