Austin Hart, Quality Control
When studying political behavior, the relationship between the state of the world and the vote is usually predictable: when times are good, incumbents tend to win reelection and when times are bad, sitting governments tend to pay the price at the polls. This phenomenon, called retrospective voting—citizens registering their appraisals of past performance in their judgment of incumbents—is the subject of SIS Professor Austin Hart’s new book Quality Control, part of Cambridge University Press’s “Elements in Experimental Political Science” series.
Past research finds voters around the world taking governments to task for outcomes in areas as diverse as economic growth, the prosecution of wars, and the making of prudent preparations for natural disasters. Yet it remains unclear from these studies if voters’ judgments sensibly differentiate competent from incompetent incumbents. How – and how effectively – do voters make sense of government performance? In this book, Hart and co-author J. Scott Matthews (Memorial University of Newfoundland) develop a new framework for studying retrospective voting and present eleven experiments building on the integration-appraisal framework, in which individuals integrate and appraise streams of performance information over time.
Although Hart and Matthews observed clear recency bias in their experiments, they found respondents who were quick to appraise and who made reasonable use of information cues. “Voters” regularly employed benchmarking strategies to manage complex, variable, and even confounded streams of performance information. The results highlight the importance of centering the integration-appraisal challenge in both theoretical models and experimental designs and begin to uncover the cognitive foundations of retrospective voting.
Quality Control was published by Cambridge University Press.