Senior Research Fellow Goethe University Frankfurt | Comparative Politics | Interested in electoral behaviour, technocracy & prime ministers
Jan Berz
Loading...
Disaster relief matters substantially, but speed does not. Respondents rewarded larger relief efforts and visible executive involvement, while faster relief alone had little effect on performance evaluations. 6/9
Overall, the article shows that voters draw on a broader array of crisis characteristics than existing research has captured - including opposition politicisation - to assess government crisis management. Future work should test these mechanisms with observational data. 9/9
Voters infer performance from substantive crisis characteristics: severity, prevention spending, relief spending, and the behaviour of political elites. 5/9
Responsibility judgments are more constrained. Voters attribute responsibility for the crisis most clearly when blame signals are plausible: reduced prevention spending, expert warnings, and - more conditionally - elite cues around the crisis. 7/9
The core finding is clear: electoral sanctioning after crises is overwhelmingly mediated by perceived crisis management performance. Responsibility for the crisis matters, but voters primarily ask whether incumbents managed the shock competently. 4/9
Existing research shows that crises shape retrospective voting, but we know far less about the specific crisis characteristics voters use to judge incumbents - especially with regard to responsibility for crisis severity. 2/9
To answer this, I use a pre-registered survey experiment with over 800 British voters. Respondents compared crisis scenarios varying by origin, severity, expert warnings, prevention spending, opposition politicisation, PM involvement, and relief spending and speed. 3/9
The experiment also indicates that voters’ political knowledge can be a source of heterogeneity in
reactions to crisis. More politically knowledgeable voters pay greater attention to disaster preparedness investments to judge government responsibility for crises. 8/9
‼️ Only 10 days left to apply for the PhD position in my group!
All info below 👇
