2017/07/19 by Michael W. Sances, Michael Sances · 60 citations
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Social Sciences · #Accountability #Attribution #Blame #Economics #Electoral Systems and Political Participation #Federalist #Fiscal Policies and Political Economy #Law #Law and economics #Local Government Finance and Decentralization #Political economy #Political science #Politics #Population #Public economics #Regression discontinuity design #Social psychology
paper · doi:10.1086/692588
published in The Journal of Politics 79(4), 1286-1301 (University of Chicago Press)
openalex publication_date 2017/07/19 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/27
How do voters attribute blame when policy responsibility is shared? While central to accountability, this question is difficult to answer because “who does what” is often ambiguous. This article exploits a case where policy responsibility is unambiguous: local tax referendums. Although presidents have no control over property taxes or the decision to raise local rates, I find that voters punish the president’s party for tax increases enacted via direct democracy. This effect is robust to adjusting for population-based measures of the local economy, as well as panel and discontinuity designs to account for unobserved factors. The effect varies with the magnitude of the tax increase but not with local economic performance, suggesting that voters react to the change in spending money, as opposed to being “primed” to consider national issues. Thus, voters punish officials not only for events that no one controls but also for policies that voters themselves enact.