Political Accountability and Responsiveness at the Midwest Political Science Association annual conference

About the author: Alexandra Blackman is a Stanford Ph.D. Candidate in political science and recipient of an FSI Conference Grant, which she used in support of her travel to present her research at the Midwest Political Science Association annual conference.

From April 4 through April 7, I traveled to Chicago to attend the Midwest Political Science Association (MPSA) annual conference for the first time and presented work on two panels. On April 5, I presented a new paper on political accountability in new democracies. In this paper, co-authored with Julia Clark and Aytug Sasmaz, we examine how politicians respond to different types of constituent threats to hold them accountable. We ran a conjoint experiment with over 1900 local politicians in Tunisia in which we vary whether a constituent says: If they do not get assistance from the local council member, he or she will: A. not vote for the politician in the future, B. he or she will tattle to the governor, or C. he or she will protest (in a final category, the constituent simply expresses gratitude for seeing the request).

Figure 1 displays our initial results. We find that politicians are more responsive to constituents who threaten to protest than to those who threaten to tattle or who threaten to not vote for the politician. This suggests that electoral accountability is a weaker means of holding a politician accountable than a threat of collective action. We received great feedback from our two discussants as well as the other panelists and audience members.