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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.

AbstractGovernment cohesiveness is known to moderate retrospective voting. While previous work on this topic has focused on characteristics of the government, we build on the literature on clarity of responsibility and the literature on valence to argue that the extent to which government and opposition are ideologically distinct also moderates retrospective voting. Two alternative expectations follow from these two theoretical perspectives. While the clarity of responsibility framework leads to the expectation that a larger difference between government and opposition will strengthen retrospective voting, the valence literature presumes that retrospective voting is stronger when ideological differences are small. Using the data of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) project, we find evidence that is in line with the clarity of responsibility framework: the higher the degree of ideological polarization between government and opposition, the larger the effect of retrospective performance evaluations on the vote.