Learning to Love Democracy: Electoral Accountability, Government Performance, and the Consolidation of Democracy
Milan Svolik, Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
A central promise of democracy is to deliver good governance by holding politicians accountable for their performance in office. I explain why, in new democracies, elections may fail as an instrument of electoral accountability and thereby precipitate the breakdown of democracy. I model the process by which elections allow candidates to build reputations for performing well and weed out those candidates that cannot be deterred from performing poorly by the threat of removal from office. This process fails when repeated dissatisfaction with the performance of individual politicians turns into doubts about the value of democracy as a political system. When successful, this process gradually strengthens voters’ belief that elections can deliver political accountability and leads to the consolidation of democracy, a state in which democratic breakdowns no longer occur. This theory explains why new and poor democracies are more vulnerable to breakdown than old and rich ones, why economic recessions lead to democratic breakdowns, and why, in new democracies, public support for democracy declines during economic downturns.