Who's to blame? the distribution of responsibility in developing democracies

British Journal of Political Science

Volumn 41, Issue 2, 2011, Pages 389-411

  Alcañiz, Isabella ^a   Hellwig, Timothy ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA   (United States)

^b INDIANA UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 82455249482     PISSN: 00071234     EISSN: 14692112     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0007123409990317     Document Type: Article

References (104)

1. E.g., Morris P. Fiorina, Retrospective Voting in American National Elections (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981).
2. Cameron Anderson, 'Responsibility Attributions, Accountability and Economic Voting: The Effect of European Multi-level Governance in Britain' (paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Philadelphia, 2006);
3. Sean Carey, 'Exploring the Causal Link between the Economy and Public Attitudes to the European Union' (paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Philadelphia, 2006);
4. Brad T. Gomez and J. Matthew Wilson, 'Causal Attribution and Economic Voting in American Congressional Elections', Political Research Quarterly, 56 (2003), 271-82;
5. Timothy Hellwig, Eve Ringsmuth and John R. Freeman, 'The American Public and the Room to Maneuver: Responsibility Attributions and Policy Efficacy in an Era of Globalization', International Studies Quarterly, 52 (2008), 855-80;
6. Mark Peffley, 'The Voter as Juror: Attributing Responsibility for Economic Problems', in H. Eulau and M. Lewis-Beck, eds, Economic Conditions and Electoral Outcomes (New York: Agathon Press, 1985);
7. Thomas J. Rudolph, 'Who's Responsible for the Economy? The Formation and Consequences of Responsibility Attributions', American Journal of Political Science, 47 (2003), 698-713.
8. Raymond M. Duch, 'A DevelopmentalModel of Heterogeneous Economic Voting in New Democracies', American Political Science Review, 95 (2001), 895-910;
9. Jan Fidrmuc, 'Economics of Voting in Post-communist Countries', Electoral Studies, 19 (2000), 199-217;
10. Alexander Pacek and Benjamin Radcliff, 'The Political Economy of Competitive Elections in the Developing World', American Journal of Political Science, 39 (1995), 745-59;
11. Karen L. Remmer, 'Economic Crisis and Elections in Latin America, 1982-1990', American Political Science Review, 85 (1991), 777-800;
12. David Samuels, 'Presidentialism and Accountability for the Economy in Comparative Perspective', American Political Science Review, 98 (2004), 425-36.
13. For example, Allyson Lucinda Benton, 'Dissatisfied Democrats or Retrospective Voters? Economic Hardship, Political Institutions, and Voting Behavior in Latin America', Comparative Political Studies 38 (2005), 417-42;
14. Byong-Kuen Jhee, 'Economic Origins of Electoral Support for Authoritarian Successors: A Cross-National Analysis of Economic Voting in New Democracies', Comparative Political Studies, 41 (2008), 362-88.
15. See Denise V. Powers and James H. Cox, 'Echoes from the Past: The Relationship between Satisfaction with Economic Reforms and Voting Behavior in Poland', American Political Science Review, 91 (1997), 617-33;
16. Joshua A. Tucker, Regional Economic Voting: Russia, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic, 1990-1999 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
17. Alberto Alesina, John Londregan and Howard Rosenthal, 'A Model of the Political Economy of the United States', American Political Science Review, 87 (1993), 12-33;
18. Alberto Alesina and Howard Rosenthal, Partisan Politics, Divided Government, and the Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995);
19. Torsten Persson and Guido Tabellini, Macroeconomic Policy, Credibility, and Politics (New York: Harwood Academic, 1990).
20. Alesina and Rosenthal, Partisan Politics.
21. Raymond M. Duch and Randolph T. Stevenson, The Economic Vote: How Political and Economic Institutions Condition Election Results (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
22. Duch and Stevenson, The Economic Vote, p. 139-40.
23. Cf. G. Bingham Powell Jr and Guy D. Whitten, 'A Cross-National Analysis of Economic Voting: Taking Account of the Political Context', American Journal of Political Science, 37 (1993), 391-414.
24. This is also true of the literature on economic voting in new democracies.
25. See studies referenced above, including Pacek and Radcliff, 'The Political Economy of Competitive Elections in the Developing World';
26. Powers and Cox, 'Echoes from the Past: The Relationship between Satisfaction with Economic Reforms and Voting Behavior in Poland';
27. Tucker, Regional Economic Voting.
28. Gomez and Wilson, 'Causal Attribution';
29. Rudolph, 'Who's Responsible for the Economy?' and 'Triangulating Political Responsibility: The Motivated Formation of Responsibility Judgments', Political Psychology, 27(2006), 99-122.
30. Duch and Stevenson, The Economic Vote;
31. Hellwig et al., 'The American Public and the Room to Maneuver'.
32. Fernando Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, Dependency and Development in Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979);
33. Peter Evans, Dependent Development: The Alliance of Multinational, State, and Local Capital in Brazil (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979).
34. Jeffry Frieden, Debt, Development, and Democracy: Modern Political Economy and Latin America, 1965-1985 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991);
35. Geoffrey Garrett, 'Globalization and Government Spending around the World', Studies in Comparative International Development, 35 (2001), 3-29;
36. Michael Loriaux, Meredith Woo-Cumings, Kent E. Calder, Sylvia Maxfield and Sofia Pérez, Capital Ungoverned: Liberalizing Finance in Interventionist States (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997);
37. Layna Mosley, Global Capital and National Governments (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003);
38. Dani Rodrik, Has Globalization Gone Too Far? (Washington, D.C.: Institute for International Economics, 1997);
39. Nita Rudra, 'Globalization and the Decline of the Welfare State in Less-Developed Countries', International Organization, 56 (2002), 411-45.
40. Robert R. Kaufman and Alex Segura-Ubiergo, 'Globalization, Domestic Politics, and Social Spending in Latin America: A Time-Series Cross-Section Analysis, 1973-97', World Politics, 53 (2001), 553-87.
41. Erik Wibbels, 'Dependency Revisited: International Markets, Business Cycles, and Social Spending in the Developing World', International Organization, 60 (2006), 433-68.
42. Candace Archer, Glen Biglaiser and Karl DeRouen, 'Sovereign Bonds and the 'Democratic Advantage: Does Regime Type Affect Credit Rating Agency Ratings in the Developing World?' International Organization, 61 (2007), 341-65.
43. Archer et al., 'Sovereign Bonds and the 'Democratic Advantage';
44. David Brown and Wendy Hunter, 'Democracy and Social Spending in Latin America', American Political Science Review, 93 (1999), 779-90;
45. Maria Victoria Murillo and Cecilia Martinez-Gallardo, 'Political Competition and Policy Adoption: Market Reforms in Latin American Public Utilities', American Journal of Political Science, 51 (2007), 120-39;
46. Adam Przeworski and James Vreeland, 'The Effect of IMF Programs on Economic Growth', Journal of Development Economics, 62 (2000), 385-421;
47. Kurt Weyland, The Politics of Market Reform in Fragile Democracies: Argentina, Brazil, Peru, and Venezuela (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002).
48. As Sarah M. Brooks, 'Explaining Capital Account Liberalization in Latin America: A Transitional Cost Approach', World Politics, 56 (2004), 389-430;
49. Wibbels, 'Dependency Revisited',
50. Others have shown, in many cases the latter are not as vulnerable and exposed to international structures as the former.
51. David Dollar and Aart Kraay, 'Growth is Good for the Poor', Journal of Economic Growth, 7 (2002), 195-225;
52. Kaufman and Segura-Ubiergo, 'Globalization, Domestic Politics, and Social Spending in Latin America';
53. Rodrik, Has Globalization Gone Too Far?
54. Michael Shafer, Winners and Losers: How Sectors Shape the Developmental Prospects of States (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994);
55. Wibbels, 'Dependency Revisited'.
56. Andy Baker, 'Why is Trade Reform so Popular in Latin America? A Consumption-Based Theory of Trade Policy Preferences', World Politics, 55 (2003), 423-55.
57. Stephan Haggard, 'The Politics of Adjustment: Lessons from the IMF's Extended Fund Facility', International Organization, 39 (1985), 505-34;
58. Anoop Singh, Agnès Belaisch, Charles Collyns, Paula De Masi, Reva Krieger, Guy Meredith and Robert Rennhack, 'Stabilization and Reform in Latin America: A Macroeconomic Perspective on the Experience since the Early 1990s' (IMF Occasional Paper 238, 2005);
59. Jana Von Stein, 'Do Treaties Constrain or Screen? Selection Bias and Treaty Compliance', American Political Science Review, 99 (2005), 611-22;
60. James Raymond Vreeland, 'The IMF: Lender of Last Resort or Scapegoat?' (paper prepared for the Midwest Political Science Association Annual Meeting, Chicago, 1999).
61. 'The International and Domestic Politics of IMF Programs' (paper prepared for the Reinventing Bretton Woods Committee and World Economic Forum Conference on The Fund's Role in Emerging Markets, Amsterdam, 2004).
62. Irfan Nooruddin and Joel W. Simmons, 'The Politics of Hard Choices: IMF Programs and Government Spending', International Organization, 60 (2006), 1001-33.
63. See Karen L. Remmer, 'The Politics of Economic Stabilization: IMF Standby Programs in Latin America, 1954-1984', Comparative Politics, 19 (1986), 1-24.
64. Dani Rodrik, 'Why is there Multilateral Lending?', in Michael Bruno and Boris Pleskovic, eds, Annual World Bank Conference on Development Economics 1995 (Washington, D.C.: World Bank Publications, 1996).
65. Frieden, Debt, Development, and Democracy.
66. See Rank Order of Debtor Nations of the CIA World Factbook (www.cia.gov).
67. Terry Lynn Karl, The Paradox of Plenty: Oil Booms and Petro-States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 172.
68. This certainly has been the case in Latin America since the 1982 debt crisis induced negative growth rates and triggered massive capital flight. Countries in the region continue to wrestle with unmanageable external debt levels.
69. As a senior official of the IMF observed in 2003: 'over the past two yearsythere has been a high concentration of financial crises in Latin America [and] debt problems have been at the heart of [these] crises' (Morris Goldstein, 'Debt Sustainability, Brazil, and the IMF', Institute for International Economics, February 2003, see www.iie.com.
70. This approach is similar to several recent papers that use the Latin American experience to shed light on broader issues in international development (e.g., Brooks, 'Explaining Capital Account Liberalization';
71. Carolina A. Fornos, Timothy J. Power and James C. Garand, 'Explaining Voter Turnout in Latin America, 1980 to 2000', Comparative Political Studies, 37 (2004), 909-40;
72. Erik Wibbels and Moisés Arce, 'Globalization, Taxation, and Burden-Shifting in Latin America', International Organization, 57 (2003), 111-36;
73. Wibbels, 'Dependency Revisited'.
74. For evidence of these intra-regional variations, see Appendix Table A1.
75. Measures on the dependent variable were not asked in earlier or more recent Latinobaró metro surveys. Study design and data are available at www.latinobarometro.org.
76. A negatively-worded question is appropriate insomuch as governments are far more likely to be blamed for poor outcomes than rewarded for good ones (Michael Lewis-Beck and Mary Stegmaier, 'Economic Models of Voting', in Russell Dalton and Hans-Dieter Klingemann, eds, The Oxford Handbook of Political Behavior (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 518-37).
77. The Economist, 24 October 2002.
78. We do not distinguish public-international from private-international in our statistical analyses since we are mainly interested in pairing private against public and international against domestic (see Table 1).
79. The residual 'No one is directly responsible' option is not used to contribute to any of our dependent variables.
80. For example, from 1990 to 2001, foreign banks' share of assets went up from 10 per cent to 61 per cent in Argentina, 0 per cent to 90 per cent in Mexico, and 4 per cent to 61 per cent in Peru (Graciela Moguillansky, Rogerio Studart and Sebastian Vergara, 'Foreign Banks in Latin America: A Paradoxical Result', CEPAL Review, 82 (2004), 21-37.
81. In addition, privatization of the banking sector has increased greatly in recent decades, from 65 per cent under state control in 1970 to only 40 per cent in 1995 (Alejandro Micco and Ugo Panizza, 'Bank Ownership and Lending Behavior', Economics Letters, 93 (2005), 248-54.
82. Alan Heston, Robert Summers and Bettina Aten, Penn World Table Version 6.2 (Center for International Comparisons of Production, Income and Prices at the University of Pennsylvania, 2006).
83. James Raymond Vreeland, The International Monetary Fund: Politics of Conditional Lending (New York: Routledge, 2007).
84. The CLYPS dataset has been developed by Kevin Cowan, Eduardo Levy Yeyati, Ugo Panizza and Federico Sturzenegger and is available at www.iadb.org.
85. The index is composed using partisanship rankings from Maria Victoria Murillo, Virginia Oliveros and Milan Vaishnav, 'Voting for the Left or Governing on the Left?' (paper prepared for the Conference on 'Latin America's Left Turn: Causes and Implications', Harvard University, 2008).
86. Here, however, we followed the classification advanced by Murillo et al. as well as Manuel Alcántara and Flavia Freidenberg, eds, Partidos Políticos de América Latina: Países Andinos (Ciudad de México: Fondo de Cultura Econó mica, 2003).
87. Finally, for Guatemalan parties, we drew on Murillo et al. as well as Jacqueline West, South America, Central America and the Caribbean 2002 (London: Routledge, 2002).
88. Heston et al., Penn World Table Version 6.2.
89. Recall that the dataset merges the 2002 and 2003 Latinobaró metro files. We might expect the competency signal to be weaker in 2002, for example, given that this was a period of increased turmoil in several countries.
90. Party identification is also a reasonable control variable to include. Unfortunately, however, the Latinobaró metro survey includes measures of party support in their 2002 survey only.
91. Andrew Gelman and Jennifer Hill, Data Analysis Using Regression and Multilevel/Hierarchical Models (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007);
92. Marco R. Steenbergen and Bradford S. Jones, 'Modeling Multilevel Data Structures', American Journal of Political Science, 46 (2002), 218-37.
93. Self-Placed Ideology, Education, and Socio-Economic Status also have consistent effects: respondents sharing the chief executive's ideology, having more years of formal education and possessing higher socio-economic status are more likely to say that international actors are responsible.
94. That is, Self-Placed Ideology = 0, Education = 4, Socio-Economic Status = 2, Female = 1 and the age category is 26-40 years.
95. We ran several additional models to assess the robustness of these findings. First, we controlled for additional political factors, including divided government and central bank independence (Simone Polillo and Mauro F. Guillen, 'Globalization Pressures and the State: The Worldwide Spread of Central Bank Independence', American Journal of Sociology, 110 (2005), 1764-802.
96. As far as mass responsibility attributions are concerned, growth of export markets has no distinguishable effect from increased access of foreign goods. We also included as contextual variables gross private capital flows and inflows of foreign direct investment from the World Development Indicators as well as a measure of restrictions on capital flows from Axel Dreher, 'Does Globalization Affect Growth? Evidence from a new Index of Globalization', Applied Economics, 38 (2006), 1091-110.
97. Murillo et al. 'Voting for the Left'.
98. Argentine President Néstor Kirchner's (2003-07) rhetoric is typical of the new Latin American left. In 2003, during his first negotiation with the IMF, he declared on a popular television show that 'The members of the Fund's bureaucracy are employees of [economic] interests and are responsible for the Argentine crisis.
99. They practically fleeced Argentina with their mistakes, and now that we are on the mend, they want to condition us' ('Kirchner apuntó al FMI, pero a la vez se pagaron US$ 268 millones', 20 December 2003, at www.clarin.com). Even Brazilian President Lula (2002-11), one of the more pragmatic representatives of this new left, has expressed the opinion that the IMF 'does not work' ('Lula: FMI e Banco Mundial, hoje, de nada servem', 31 October 2008, at www.noticias.br.msn.com).
100. Under this same scenario, the citizen attributes responsibility to the government's economic policy with probability of just 0.05.
101. The dependent variable is coded 1 if the respondent intended to vote for a left-of-centre party and 0 if s/he intended to vote for a non-left party. While we find that individuals who attribute responsibility to international actors are more likely to intend to vote for the left, this effect is no greater than the increased probability of voting left among those who assign responsibility to the government's policy. The results of these additional analyses are available from http://mypage.iu.edu/ , thellwig/.
102. Christopher J. Anderson and Matthew M. Singer, 'The Sensitive Left and the Impervious Right: Multilevel Models and the Politics of Inequality, Ideology, and Legitimacy in Europe', Comparative Political Studies, 41 (2008), 564-99, provide a recent overview of the growth of multi-level models of individual behaviour in comparative politics.
103. Duch, 'A Developmental Model', argues that tendencies to holding the incumbent accountable for the economy in new democracies increase as ambiguity regarding the link between government policy and economic outcomes declines.
104. The Economist, 10 March 2007.