In mature democracies, elections discipline leaders to deliver good economic performance. Since the fall of the Soviet Union most developing countries also hold elections, but these are often marred by illicit tactics. Using a new global data set, this paper investigates whether these illicit tactics are merely blemishes or substantially undermine the economic efficacy of elections.
It shows that illicit tactics are widespread, and that they reduce the incentive for governments to deliver good economic performance. Revisiting the celebrated result that ‘leaders matter’, the study shows that it is dependent upon the absence of clean elections: changes of leader matter a lot in systems without clean elections, whereas in those with clean elections they are not significant.
This paper treats the scope for a leader to use illicit tactics as exogenous: some leaders inherit norms and institutions which preclude their use whereas others are unrestrained. Where a leader has the option of resorting to illicit tactics, the choice as to whether to hold an election is of little consequence: the normal discipline of democracy is compromised. The study presents a new global data set which integrates data on changes in incumbency with data on elections classified according to the quality of their conduct. This is used to demonstrate that electoral misconduct is both widespread and highly efficacious for incumbent politicians.
The paper then explores whether this matters materially for economic performance. It illustrates that whereas honest elections effectively discipline the economic choices of political leaders, illicit tactics substantially reduce the incentive for politicians to deliver good economic performance. It concludes by investigating a testable implication. Whether economic performance is independent of the person of the leader should depend upon whether leaders are subject to honest elections.
Key Findings:
- Elections are, potentially, the technology by which government is held to account by citizens, in the process imposing discipline on economic policy. Illicit electoral tactics are highly attractive for incumbents. The strategy of using illicit electoral tactics trumps strategies confined to licit tactics, more than doubling the expected duration in office at the means of other variables.
- Illicit tactics reduce the incentives for the incumbent to attend to economic performance. Our results suggest that incumbents standing in clean elections are penalised if they do not deliver economic growth, their time in office is about 40 % shorter compared to incumbents promoting economic growth. Incumbents standing in dirty elections face a much smaller penalty, economic stagnation shortens their time in office by only 23 %.
- An implication is that the misconduct of elections can be expected to subvert the discipline otherwise exerted on governments to achieve good economic performance. This is a testable hypothesis: if it is correct, whether changes of leadership matter for economic performance should depend upon whether leaders are subject to the discipline of clean elections. For those leaders subject to clean elections, the hypothesis that changes of leadership had no significant effects could not be rejected. In contrast, in those polities where leaders either did not face elections or were able to use illicit tactics, changes of leadership had large and significant effects.
