Productivity-based retrospective voting: Legislative productivity and voting in the 2019 European Parliament elections
| Author | Miriam Sorace |
| Published date | 01 November 2021 |
| Date | 01 November 2021 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0263395721991403 |
| Subject Matter | Special Issue Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0263395721991403
Politics
2021, Vol. 41(4) 504 –521
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/0263395721991403
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Productivity-based
retrospective voting:
Legislative productivity and
voting in the 2019 European
Parliament elections
Miriam Sorace
University of Kent, UK; London School of Economics and Political Science, UK
Abstract
Are European Parliament (EP) elections used to pass judgement on the legislative behaviour of
parties serving in the EP? Do Europeans give a bonus in EP elections to political parties whose
members were highly active during the legislative term? The article will focus on the role of
legislative activities in the eighth EP term (2014–2019) in informing the 2019 vote choice. The
analysis combines the European Election Studies (EESs) 2019 Voter Study data with original
legislative behaviour data, as well as with data on European electoral systems. The evidence points
to productivity-based retrospective voting being a feature of the 2019 elections. Furthermore, the
analysis finds that this type of retrospective voting is stronger in countries where electoral rules
encourage candidates to promote past legislative records in electoral campaigns, and particularly so
for voters that paid attention to the EP campaign in such systems. This has significant implications
for the retrospective voting and EU elections literatures, since it is evidence that the very
demanding democratic desiderata of retrospection can be met in multi-level and supranational
contexts as well.
Keywords
accountability, European Parliament elections, retrospective voting
Received: 18th May 2020; Revised version received: 9th December 2020; Accepted: 17th December 2020
Introduction
A central requirement of democracy is that voters should be competent and well-informed.
Assessing the past records of elected representatives is considered an optimal strategy to
cast competent, well-informed votes. V.O. Key (1966: 7), for example, concluded that
‘voters are not fools’ after finding evidence of competent retrospection in the American
public. Anthony Downs (1957) also placed heavy emphasis on past records evaluations as
the ideal strategy to accurately predict the nature and future behaviour of elected repre-
sentatives. The argument goes that while voters may be ignorant of their own and of
Corresponding author:
Miriam Sorace, Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Quantitative Politics, Rutherford College, University of
Kent, Canterbury CT2 7NZ, UK.
Email: m.sorace@kent.ac.uk
991403POL0010.1177/0263395721991403PoliticsSorace
research-article2021
Special Issue Article
Sorace 505
parties’ positions on various policy matters, their capacity to competently evaluate past
records is necessary and sufficient to gauge politicians’ nature and skills, and to reward or
sanction elected representatives appropriately. Many studies find that voters in advanced
democracies do vote retrospectively (Healy and Malhotra, 2013). Does retrospective vot-
ing apply in the context of European Parliament (EP) elections?
More specifically, the article investigates ‘productivity-based retrospective voting’ in
the context of the 2019 EP elections. While policy outputs – such as economic outcomes
– are the yardstick used to evaluate incumbent executives, measures of productivity and
hard work are better signals in legislative elections, especially in non-parliamentary sys-
tems (McDermott and Jones, 2003). Moreover, legislative productivity is easy to observe
and universally considered a proxy of good, trustworthy politicians (Papp and Russo,
2018). ‘Valence’ indicators are considered more appropriate to successfully engage in
retrospection since they are less likely to be subject to bias (Ferejohn, 1986).
We know that performance voting targeting (a) domestic executives’ action (second-
order voting) and/or (b) EU economic policies (economic voting) are features of EP elec-
tions (Hix and Marsh, 2010; Hobolt and De Vries, 2016; Reif and Schmitt, 1980). But do
EP elections serve to pass judgement specifically on the performance and productivity of
parties serving in the EP, thus working as EP-specific accountability devices? If that is the
case, we can conclude that EP elections meet important democratic desiderata (Carey and
Shugart, 1995; François and Navarro 2019; McDermott and Jones, 2003; Papp and Russo,
2018).
This article innovatively applies the retrospective voting framework to EP elections by
linking voting behaviour and legislative activities at the EP level. The analysis explores
EP elections on their own terms, avoiding comparisons related to parties’ vote share
changes or vote switching behaviour from previous national elections. Voter-party dyads
will be analysed instead, via data stacking. The dependent variable captures whether the
respondent voted (1) or not (0) for each national party contesting the 2019 EP elections in
his or her country. Party performance will be measured using legislative participation
records from the eighth term of the EP, instead of relying on perceptions of EU perfor-
mance captured via surveys.
The findings show that, controlling for other relevant party characteristics and for
ideological proximity with voters, voters are more likely to support parties whose mem-
bers were more active in the EP. EU level activity is therefore associated with electoral
choice in EP elections, and the effect is stronger in context where the electoral rule
encourages candidates to publicise their past legislative records, particularly for voters
who paid attention to the EP campaign. Competent retrospective voting is typically con-
sidered an unusual feat: that we see emerging evidence of the productivity-based type of
retrospective voting in the 2019 elections is therefore a crucial finding, and one that fun-
damentally challenges the characterisation of EP elections as mere barometers of national
politics.
Literature review: The retrospective voting model and EP elections
Retrospective voting refers to the act of evaluating past performances to reward or sanc-
tion elected representatives. The model originated in the works of Key (1966), Downs
(1957), and Fiorina (1981) who theorised that a responsible, rational electorate learns,
and updates information using past experience, and votes on the basis of evaluations of
past behaviour. The literature on retrospective voting is dominated by the study of the role
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