Democratic Accountability and Retrospective Voting in the Lab

I conduct a laboratory experiment to investigate whether voters focus on the problem of electoral selection or if they instead focus on electoral sanctioning. If voters are forward-looking but also uncertain about politicians' unobservable characteristics, then it is rational to focus on selection. But doing so undermines democratic accountability because selection renders sanctioning an empty threat. As a consequence, politicians have no incentives to utilize policy-relevant expertise to serve the interests of voters, so any expertise they have is wasted. In contrast to the game theoretic predictions, the experimental results indicate a strong behavioral tendency to use a retrospective voting rule even when the rule is not sequentially rational. Additional experiments suggest two reasons. Retrospective voting is a simple heuristic that voters use to cope with the cognitive complexity presented by a difficult inference and decision problem. Voters also have a preference for accountability and are concerned about sanctioning politicians rather than purely focused on selection. Although voters are not fully rational, their bounded rationality ensures that politicians are democratically accountable