Accountability and alternation: How wholesale and partial alternation condition retrospective voting

Abstract

Holding the government accountable is a crucial function of elections. The extent to which voters can actually do so depends on the political system. One element that may influence the likelihood that voters hold the government accountable is the difference between wholesale and partial alternation. Prominent political scientists like Mair, Bergman and Strøm and Pellegata and Quaranta propose that in countries with wholesale alternation voters are better able to hold governments accountable because in essence voters have the choice to keep their current government or ‘throw the rascals out’. However, this relationship has not been tested. We examine the relationship between partial and wholesale alternation and retrospective voting in a large-N cross-country study. We show that the association between government satisfaction and vote choice is stronger in countries with wholesale alternation than in systems with partial alternation.