Attributions of Policy-Making Influence in Coalitional Systems: How (Most) Voters Get it (Mostly) Right

• In Event: The Life-Cycle of Multiparty Parliamentary Government

Abstract

Democratic theorists have long argued that voters are unable to hold their policymakers accountable in coalitional democracies because they lack the ability to properly attribute responsibility for outcomes. We argue that voters employ an array of simple, cheap, and accurate heuristic tools to make attributions in complex multiparty policymaking environments. We use original data from five parliamentary democracies to show that the majority of voters possess the coarse informational inputs and heuristic rules necessary to infer policy responsibility with a high level of accuracy.

Authors

• David Fortunato, Texas A&M University

• Nick C.N. Lin, Rice University

• Randolph T. Stevenson, Rice University

• Mathias Tromborg, Rice University