Prime Ministers' Hard Choices: Legislative Performance and Voter Evaluation

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

Abstract

We examine how voters evaluate the legislative performance of prime ministers using a large survey experiment. Prime ministers in many democracies are institutionally powerful actors that frequently have to make hard choices in the policymaking process. Confronted with legislative opposition from within their government or from other parties, they can use procedural force to pass their policy, retreat, or make concessions. While researchers have suggested that the evaluation of government performance is crucial for political accountability, they are also concerned that voters’ evaluations are biased, and government legislative performance has largely remained a black box. We assess how voters respond to prime ministers’ actions using an experimental research design that opens the black box of legislative performance. Our conjoint design experimentally varies key dimensions of legislative performance, including the policy (immigration or wealth taxation), the partisan identity as well as the action taken by the prime minister. Among others, we find that prime ministers are punished for the use of procedural force. We show that this effect reflects the actual choice of legislative procedure rather than merely mirroring voters’ prior dispositions. However, core voters are even more critical when their prime minister retreats rather than uses procedural force to promote their preferred policy. This aspect has been neglected by previous theoretical and empirical work. It explains the puzzle why prime ministers sometimes rely on procedural force despite its unpopularity.

Authors

• Sylvain Brouard, Duplicate Related Group Chair record

• Michael Becher, IE University