2 - Bounded Accountability

Summary

Chapter 2 presents the bounded accountability theory of incumbency bias and its main empirical predictions and outlines the core empirical strategy for testing the theory across the country–office cases. After offering a conceptualization and typology of incumbency bias, the chapter explains how the nature of the information environment encourages retrospective voting and leads to the emergence of incumbency bias. Based on this general mechanism, the chapter predicts that the alignment of policy scope and fiscal institutions explains why some democracies exhibit incumbency advantage while others display an incumbency disadvantage, and demonstrates how exogenous shocks may lead to within-country changes in incumbency bias. The chapter also derives predictions about why there are differences between personal and party incumbency bias. It concludes by developing a novel estimation framework that extends the close-election regression discontinuity design to measure incumbency bias in different political systems and document variation in direction and type within them.