Julie Anne Weaver

“Electoral Dis-connection: The Limits of Re-Election In Contexts of Weak Overall Accountability” (Journal of Politics, 83(4):October 2021.)

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Holding politicians accountable through re-election has long been a focus of empirical work, yet results are mixed as to whether electoral accountability works in practice. I offer a new theory of voter behavior to explain why electoral accountability may break down. Where voters perceive a greater likelihood of malfeasance in a second term, information about good performance in the first term becomes irrelevant to predicting good performance in the second. Accordingly, voters turn to other accountability institutions for assurance that re-elected incumbents will perform well. I test this argument in the context of mayoral politics in Peru. In a conjoint experiment embedded in an original survey, respondents prefer challengers even when explicitly informed the incumbent performed well, and the effect is strongest among those who doubt good performance will continue if re-elected. Using a regression discontinuity design, I then show that mayors face a significant incumbency disadvantage, and that neither good performance nor voters' access to performance information enables mayors to overcome it. Instead, it is voter trust in accountability institutions that helps attenuate anti-incumbency bias. Together, these results suggest that attempts to improve electoral accountability by expanding voter access to performance information may prove inadequate without strong central-level oversight, and, more broadly, that re-election may fail to generate political accountability when other accountability institutions are weak.

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“Rewarding Performance in Disaster Response: Evidence from Local Governments in

Latin America" (with Felipe Livert Aquino and Paola Bordon Tapia, World Development, 188: January 2025.) 

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Given the increasing frequency of large-scale disasters, managing such emergencies is becoming an important domain of politicians’ responsibilities in office. Models of electoral accountability posit that voter reward and sanctioning in re-elections incentivizes good performance. Yet little accountability research considers how electoral incentives impact this new type of public sector responsibility. Most studies of electoral responses to disasters tend to study voter reactions to the existence of the disaster itself, rather than how politicians perform in responding to it after the fact. Those that do incorporate performance use metrics like disaster declarations or allocating relief aid, which may be relevant for national actors, but not local-level politicians whose main role in disaster response is spending the funds they receive from the central level to manage recovery efforts. Furthermore, most research studies only one disaster at a time and focuses on economically advanced countries. Our approach addresses each of these gaps by combining local-level electoral returns in Chile and Peru with detailed data on how mayors perform in responding to a variety of natural catastrophes. We find that voters do in fact reward local politicians that effectively manage disasters, providing a blueprint for how to best incentivize disaster responsiveness going forward.

 

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''The Democratic Erosion Event Dataset (DEED)," (with Baron, Hannah, Robert A. Blair, Jessica Gottlieb, Laura Paler, and Benjamin Yoel, Revise and Resubmit, Scientific Data)

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"How Informational State Capacity Shapes Government Responses to Shocks: Evidence from the COVID-19 Pandemic" (with Michael Harsch and Alexandra Norris, Working Paper, Under Review)

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"Political Science Research, Generalizability, and Policy Engagement" (with Hannah Baron), chapter in edited volume, Rethinking Generalization, Cambridge Univ. Press.

 

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Gottlieb, Jessica, Hannah Baron, Robert A. Blair, Laura Paler, and Julie Anne Weaver. 2025. “Democratic Erosion Event Dataset v7”  Winner of the 2025 Lijphart/Przeworski/Verba Best Dataset Honorable Mention.

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