1
Introduction
The central proposition of modern democratic theory is that repeated elections function as a
mechanism of accountability. The underlying logic behind this claim is simple: If politicians
want to be reelected and if voters condition their ballots on policy outcomes, then politicians
have an incentive to implement policies that benefit the electorate. Otherwise, they lose.
This argument is intuitive and well known, but is it empirically true? Does the system of
repeated elections function as a mechanism of political control?
This question is particularly interesting in the case of new democracies of Eastern Europe
because these countries permit us to study electoral control in the context of unstable party
systems. As has been well documented, politicians in post-communist Europe frequently
switch political parties either by creating new parties and abandoning their old ones or by
moving from one existing party to another (references). As a result, new party systems
consist of many short-lived organizations with murky policy reputations and fluid personnel.
This is in contrast to mature democracies where well-organized parties tend to persist for
long periods of time and mange to develop clear policy reputation and stable leadership
structures. Since the current understanding of electoral control is based primarily on the
analysis of the established democracies of the West (references), we have only a limited
understanding of how electoral control works, if at all, in the context of fluid party systems
(references). Indeed, a number of basic questions about the impact of fluid party systems
on electoral accountability have not yet been studied.
To appreciate the significance of this point, focus on individual legislators and notice that
fluid party systems create a situation where the process of electoral control could take two
distinct forms. The first possibility is that electoral control works through political parties,
just like it does in mature democracies. In this case, when policy outcomes are bad, voters
1
Convention