Does Partisanship Hurt Electoral Accountability? Individual-Level and Aggregate-Level Comparisons of Western and Postcommunist Democracies.

This paper provides an empirical test on the relationship between party identification and electoral accountability. In the Western context, partisanship is found to restrict the extent to which representatives are held accountable for their economic performance (Kayser and Wlezien 2011; Tillman 2008), but this mechanism has not been tested in the postcommunist context. Moreover, whether the inverse relationship varies across different political contexts remains unexplored. This paper seeks to fill this void. I further test for the possibility that how Western and postcommunist democracies differ in the relationship would depend on the level of analysis, since a change from being nonpartisan to partisan at the individual level has different political meanings and implications than an increase in partisanship at the aggregate level. Based on a series of individual-level and aggregate-level tests on a range of Western and postcommunist democracies from 1989 to 2012, I find that partisanship does have a negative impact on electoral accountability regardless of the level of analysis. Comparing the Western and postcommunist context, the individual-level analysis reveals that the negative impact is more salient in postcommunist democracies than in Western democracies; however, this tendency is reversed when it comes to the aggregate-level analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]