In separation of powers systems, the success of the president and the legislature in shaping policy varies with the balance of institutional power ascribed to each branch of government. In this paper, I study the extent to which these institutional factors impact individual citizens' evaluation of the work carried out by each branch of government. I reason that individual citizens will evaluate a branch of government controlled by ideologically distant elected officials in a particularly negative way when it possesses the institutional powers necessary to change policy in its preferred direction. Leveraging variation in institutional designs in 11 Latin American democracies and using data from 17 AmericasBarometer surveys, I find that institutional designs affect individual citizens' perceptions of the work conducted by the president and the legislature, which should affect how they punish or reward elected officials for their actions.
Does police performance affect mayoral approval? Do citizens hold mayors accountable when they are dissatisfied with the police? Despite the established body of research on executive approval, little is known about how public opinion on a particular bureaucratic branch - police department in this case - affects mayoral leadership. Past research suggests a positive association between police performance and mayoral approval. However, recent incidents on police violence challenge this straightforward relationship, as mayors tend to distance themselves from police brutality and promise to reform the police department. Using comparable survey data in Chicago and New York, this paper examines the relationship between police performance and mayoral approval. Results find siginificant differences between the two cities: While police performance positively affects mayoral approval in Chicago, it is inversely related in New York City. This divergence, I argue, may stem from the distinct political structure of the two cities and calls for a close look at how institutional differences can influence public opinion at the local level.
How do government institutions respond to media scrutiny in the face of scandals? Do they "clamp down" on transparency in attempt to minimize negative information becoming public, or do they "open up" in attempt to bolster their credibility? We answer this question using novel data from the Mexican federal government. We first develop novel measures of media scrutiny and scandal incidence based on a corpus of 350,000 news articles pertaining to 25 Mexican federal ministries, identifying scandals based on bursts of negative media attention. We then evaluate government responsiveness using administrative data on over one million requests for government information over a twelve year period, with their associated responses. For each scandal onset, we can compare not only affected and unaffected ministries both before and after, but also examine information requests that are already "in the queue" when the scandal begins, offering unique empirical leverage. This research design will offer important new findings on government responsiveness at crucial moments of heightened public interest.
This paper analyzes how the evaluations of individual politicians are affected by policy failures, and how these failures alter the foundations and heuristics on which individuals rely to evaluate these politicians. Through the implementation of a synthetic control method and an “Unexpected Event During Surveys Design” this study aims to contribute to the debate on whether citizens can single out responsibilities for the failures of individual politicians. The paper draws on extensive data on the evaluation of Spanish Ministers, and it exploits the coincidence of the failure of the Spanish Health Minister to manage a crisis with the fieldwork of a representative survey. Given that the day at which respondent are surveyed is as if-random, this crisis represents a unique opportunity to identify the causal effect of political fiascos on citizens’ attitudes. The results indicate that: (i) policy failures have a strong impact on the evaluation and name recognition of politicians; (ii) citizens are able to single out responsibilities for specific policy failures; (iii) policy failures change the foundations of citizens’ evaluations, who become less likely to rely on heuristics.