Citation

Carreras M, Visconti G. Elect. Stud. 2022; 79: e102522.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2022, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.electstud.2022.102522

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Are right-wing incumbents punished for failures in public security? Partisan accountability models predict greater sanctions for politicians who fail to deliver on issues they "own." According to this logic, right-wing incumbents should suffer more from crime spikes. Contrary to this expectation, we show that right-wing governments are not always punished for sudden increases in crime just before an election. We take advantage of rich local crime data in Chile and Mexico to identify places that experienced a crime shock, and use a difference-in-differences design to illustrate the heterogeneous electoral effects of public security failures. We also provide survey evidence from 18 Latin American countries to improve the external validity of the main findings. We hold that right-wing incumbents' greater electoral resilience to crime spikes could be explained by voters attributing security failures to exogenous factors or by voters still perceiving left-wing and centrist challengers as less competent at addressing crime.

Language: en

Keywords

Accountability; Crime; Issue ownership; Latin America; Right-wing incumbents