A vast literature demonstrates that
voters around the world who benefit from their governments'
discretionary spending cast more ballots for the incumbent party
than those who do not benefit. But contrary to most theories of
political accountability, some suggest that voters also reward
incumbent parties for implementing ``programmatic'' spending
legislation, over which incumbents have no discretion, and even when
passed with support from all major parties. Why voters would
attribute responsibility when none exists is unclear, as is why
minority party legislators would approve of legislation that would
cost them votes. We study the electoral effects of two large
prominent programmatic policies that fit the ideal type especially
well, with unusually large scale experiments that bring more
evidence to bear on this question than has previously been
possible. For the first policy, we design and implement ourselves
one of the largest randomized social experiments ever. For the
second policy, we reanalyze studies that used a large scale
randomized experiment and a natural experiment to study the same
question but came to opposite conclusions. Using corrected data and
improved statistical methods, we show that the evidence from all
analyses of both policies is consistent: programmatic policies have
no effect on voter support for incumbents. We conclude by discussing
how the many other studies in the literature may be interpreted in
light of our results. |