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Competitive elections create a relationship of formal accountability between policy makers and citizens. Recent theoretical work suggests that there are limits on how well this formal accountability links policy decisions to citizen preferences. In particular, incumbents' incentives are driven not by the voters' evaluation of the normative desirability of outcomes but by the outcome's information about the incumbent's type (e.g., competence or ideology). This review surveys both this body of theory and the robust empirical literature it has spawned. It concludes with a short discussion of ongoing work that attempts to integrate this theoretical perspective with a richer view of policy-making institutions. Adapted from the source document.

Two candidates compete for elective office. Each candidate has information she would like to reveal to the voters, but this requires costly advertising. The candidates can solicit contributions from interest groups to finance such advertising. These contributions are secured by promises to perform favors for the contributors, should the candidate win the election. Voters understand this and elect the candidate they like best, taking into account their expectations about promises to special interests. There is an incumbency advantage in fundraising, which is sometimes so great that the incumbent faces no serious opposition at all. Introducing partial public financing through matching funds improves voter welfare in districts that have advertising under the decentralized system, while it can reduce welfare in other districts. The optimal policy must strike a balance between these two effects.

AbstractWe study the problem of how citizens should punish or reward a leader's choices during international crises. Audiences should impose costs rooted in citizens' preferences over policy outcomes, but that need not mean that these costs directly reflect the citizens' preferences over actions. Instead, rewards and punishments are valued for their equilibrium consequences. To understand how citizens' policy preferences shape electoral accountability, we characterize the retention strategies that maximize citizen welfare. In the optimal strategy, citizens always punish leaders who initiate crises and then back down. This is a robust finding, and true even though the citizens have no intrinsic preferences for policy consistency. Whether they punish leaders for backing down rather than going to war, on the other hand, depends on the status quo and on the costs of war. Importantly, these strategies of rewarding and punishing leaders need not have any immediate connection to voter's ex ante preferences over war and peace, even if preferences over policy outcomes ultimately motivate citizen behavior. This has important implications for interpreting empirical and experimental results related to audience costs.