An important difference among representative democracies lies in the extent to which governing politicians are clearly responsible for policy-making. Research shows that this affects whether voters punish and reward politicians for policy outcomes. In this article, we explore whether politicians recognize this and become more likely to enact the policies voters electorally reward. To estimate the causal effect of clarity of responsibility on politicians’ behavior, we exploit an electoral discontinuity in responsibility for local tax policy in Denmark—a salient policy area.

Talk by Tim Bale, Queen Mary University of London

Eastern European politics is largely seen as erratic, unstructured, and in flux. If any patterning can be found, most works expect it to be largely shaped by the experience of communism. This work argues that eastern European politics, despite their specific post-communist characteristics, follow a number of long-standing sociological and political regularities. They are in fact significantly shaped by state-building, ethnicity, and religion — all classical Lipset-Rokkanian divides well known to scholars of established democracies.