Political Accountability or Political Evasion? An Examination of Politician-Voter Linkages in Hybrid Regimes

One of the main aims of representative governance surrounds the ability of citizens to hold their elected leaders accountable for their actions. In principle, this is only possible when voters know and comprehend the policy positions of their elected leaders, which of course requires political parties and politicians to be transparent and consistent in staking out issue positions. One particular way of examining this fundamental function of democracy is through politician-voter linkages (Kitschelt 2000). The field of comparative politics acknowledges that linkages form between politicians and voters both through the issues and policy positions taken as well as through the exchange of goods, services, and benefits for political support. As such linkages based on policy and issue stances are less corruptible and provide voters with a larger role in democratic governance, much recent focus has been devoted to understanding under what circumstances such linkages develop. The bulk of this scholarship has focused on this process generally, noting differences among levels of political and economic development (Kitschelt and Wilkinson 2007; Kitschelt and Kselman 2013), while other studies have suggested that substantively different linkages emerge in developing states (Lupu and Riedl 2013; Bleck and van de Walle 2013). All of these studies have viewed all states on a spectrum of democracy, occupying spaces ranging from developing to developed. Yet recently, comparative politics scholars have 1 Megan Hauser is a PhD candidate in the School of Government and Public Policy at the University of Arizona. She can be reached at [email protected].