The REPAL 2017 Best Paper Committee has awarded the Best Paper Prize to Daniela Campello and Cesar Zucco’s “Commodity Price Shocks and Misattribution of Responsibility for the Economy: Observational and Experimental Evidence”. Campello and Zucco begin with the observation that democratic accountability implies that voters are able to correctly assign responsibility – in this case for economic performance – to politicians and to withhold blame when outcomes are beyond their control. Empirical work in the Latin American region has challenged this assumption, suggesting that misattribution of responsibility is common place. Building on a psychological literature that suggests that biases based on conscious mental processes like these are more amenable to corrective action through the provision of information, they use a carefully constructed survey-experimental design, implemented in Brazil and Ecuador, to show that provision of (truthful) information can in fact correct these biases – but only for more those with ex ante levels of political information. The findings present important theoretical and practical insights for those concerned with the quality of democratic politics, albeit with the distressing implication that information has only a modest effect in reducing the effect of misattribution, and has discernable effects only among more sophisticated voters.
The runner-up to the Best Paper Prize is German Feierherd’s “Labor Standards and Electoral Accountability: Causal Evidence from Brazil”. Feierherd’s paper contributes to fundamental questions about electoral accountability and labor politics. In studies of the political economy of Latin America, rarely do we have clear analyses that can determine whether citizens punish elected officials for poor performance, and whether elected officials respond to these incentives. Moreover, while there have been important studies showing how partisanship influences labor policy and collective bargaining, we know little about how partisan politics concretely change the welfare of workers. Through his careful analyses of municipal elections and deaths in the workplace in Brazil, Feierherd shows that voters punish elected officials who have made promises to support workers when there are fatal workplace accidents. In addition, he reveals that elected officials do respond to these incentives, as workplace deaths decline when the PT gains power.