Accountability in Markovian elections

Abstract

We study electoral accountability in a dynamic environment with complete information. As our normative benchmark, we take the solution of the dynamic programming problem facing the representative voter as if he chose policy directly. There always exist equilibria in which the congruent politician type, whose policy preferences match those of the voter, is accountable, in the sense that these politicians achieve the idealized benchmark. We demonstrate that challenges to electoral accountability stem from multiple equilibria with undesirable normative properties, and we give examples of novel political failures in a model of dynamic public investment. We do not allow the voter or politicians to commit. Nevertheless, we identify a class of reciprocal equilibria such that voter welfare converges to the normative benchmark, and we give conditions under which non-congruent politician types are asymptotically accountable, for every selection of such equilibria as the players become patient.