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While political accountability requires that voters can form an accurate picture of government performance, public evaluations of government performance in established democracies are often distorted by partisan considerations. We test whether the same factors bias evaluations of government performance in a new democracy where partisanship is less stable and defined. This analysis estimates individual-level models of retrospective national economic evaluations in South Korea's 2017 presidential election. South Korea has unstable party politics, low levels of party institutionalization, and high levels of public distrust in political parties. Yet even in this context we find that voters' economic evaluations are significantly affected by political loyalties such as party identification. This endogeneity is sufficiently large that it results in aggregate consumer evaluations of the economy that systematically vary across regions depending upon the relationship of the president to that region. The findings confirm that party identification shapes citizen opinions even in a context where its effect would likely be weak. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theories of democratic legitimacy argue that people who believe the government is well managed and represents their interests are likely to defend the democratic status quo. Principal-agent theory predicts, however, that these same groups are also more likely to support executive actions that threaten vertical or horizontal accountability. Citizens who feel represented by an ideologically sympathetic and competent executive may be willing to delegate the president additional authority to enact their agenda, even at the expense of democratic principles. Survey data from Latin America are largely consistent with the principal-agent hypothesis; those who voted for the ruling party in the previous election or who perceive that the economy is strong say they not only like democracy and oppose coups but also support limits on critical actors and opposition parties and are willing to let the president bypass the legislature and court. Thus to understand the breakdown of democracy, we must not only examine the conditions that leave the losers of political and economic processes satisfied with the process that culminated in their defeat but also identify conditions when winners tolerate electoral and institutional challenges and are willing to protect space for public criticism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: A central tenet of electoral systems'' research is that more parties should get votes in districts with large magnitudes than in districts with smaller magnitudes. This proposition is largely untested at the district level, even though that is the level at which relevant pressures are expected to work. At the aggregate level, research has found that there are systematic deviations from Duverger''s law related to incentives from ethnolinguistic fragmentation, institutions, and strategic voting. This analysis confirms that many of these results hold at the district level, which is the most appropriate level for testing Duverger''s law. District level party-system fragmentation patterns in 44 countries support Duverger''s basic hypotheses. The effect of electoral institutions is contingent, however, upon the presence of social cleavages that generate pressures for additional parties, the establishment of patterns of party-system competition that help voters evaluate contenders'' viability, and the absence of competing incentives generated by districts of varying magnitudes. These effects are robust to different specifications of social heterogeneity. However, we find no evidence that institutional features like federalism or presidentialism reduce the strategic effects of district level factors. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]