Brief Description
The extent to which citizens control government.
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This book contributes to debates in positive democratic theory about accountability and representation. It bridges the gap between formal models and theoretically weak empirical analyses. The chapters stay close to the results of the formal literature, but they provide a more realistic description of how the democratic control of governments operates. The book studies the many obstacles that citizens face to hold governments accountable: (1) voters combine judgments of past performance with other considerations such as ideological or ethnic criteria; (2) parties in office may limit the information of voters; and (3) institutions bias the exercise of accountability."
Review Quotes
1. "The chapters are refreshingly eclectic in their theoretical approach, blending retrospective, spatial, and sociological theories of voting in thoughtful and productive ways." --Leonard Ray, Louisiana State University: Comparative Politics Book Reviews
2. "By analyzing topics such as political knowledge, ethnicity, and internal party politics thorough the lens of agency theory, Controlling Governments offers fresh insights into how citizens use their votes to influence elections and political stability. The book is a significant contribution that will be valuable to anyone interested in the comparative study of political representation."
John D. Huber, Columbia University
3. "Controlling Governments represents an enormous advance in empirical democratic theory. The volume underscores the obstacles that voters face in holding democratic governments accountable and thus points toward reforms that may strengthen accountability. The chapters in this tightly integrated volume contain important new findings about how democracy works, such as that incumbency is an electoral disadvantage in developing democracies, that voters hold parties of the right and left to different performance standards, and that more-sophisticated voters pay more attention to performance, less-sophisticated ones to ideology. It will be must reading for positive and normative theorists of democracy and for students of comparative politics and government."
Susan Stokes, Yale University
