Judging a record or choosing a programme: retrospective voting
One can vote for what one expects of a candidate, or against what one holds against the incumbents. The second logic is old, simple, and more debated than it seems.
Two ways of looking at an election
Prospective voting compares programmes and chooses the one that promises the best future. Retrospective voting looks back: it assesses what the outgoing team has produced, and returns or replaces it according to the judgement passed on the period just ended.
The two logics coexist in most voters. Their relative weight varies with the election, the legibility of records and the trust placed in promises, which many consider less reliable than experience already lived through.
A control within everyone's reach
V. O. Key offered an influential defence of it in The Responsible Electorate, published in 1966: voters are not fools, they judge what they have seen. Morris Fiorina extended the analysis in 1981 in Retrospective Voting in American National Elections.
The argument is strong. Judging a record requires far less information than assessing a detailed programme, and the threat of being punished encourages those who govern to take account of the governed. The vote becomes an instrument of control accessible without expertise.
The documented limits
Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels, in Democracy for Realists in 2016, highlight two weaknesses. Voters supposedly give excessive weight to the last months of a term, and sometimes punish events over which those in government had no control.
These conclusions are disputed. Other researchers consider that voters also judge how governments respond to the unforeseen, which is relevant information, and that the alleged myopia remains a reasonable approximation when information is costly.
When responsibility is hard to assign
Retrospective voting presupposes knowing who is responsible. G. Bingham Powell and Guy Whitten showed in 1993 that the link between the economic situation and the vote is sharper when government responsibility is clearly identifiable.
Coalitions and the sharing of power between levels of government or between institutions blur this attribution. Each can then claim the successes and pass the failures on to another level, which weakens the control the voter exercises and pushes them to judge on impressions more than on identifiable decisions.
What this changes in knowing oneself
A retrospective vote says almost nothing about the values of the person who casts it. Two people with very different convictions may punish the same record, one because the action was insufficient, the other because it was excessive.
That is a reason to distinguish the judgement on a record from the position on substantive questions. An opinion profile measures the latter, and can therefore differ appreciably from past votes without any contradiction.
One question helps take stock: at your last vote, were you thinking first of what was to come, or of what had happened? Neither answer is better or worse, but it sheds light on what the ballot expressed.
Key points
Retrospective voting judges a record rather than a programme, and requires little information.
Its defenders see in it an effective control, its critics a myopic and sometimes misdirected punishment.
It presupposes identifiable responsibility, which the sharing of power makes hard to establish.
This article describes documented mechanisms and disagreements. It recommends no position, no party and no vote, and commits to no reading other than that of the work it cites.
And you, where do you stand?
The Civix test situates your convictions on six dimensions and matches you with one of the twelve profiles, without ever telling you what to think.
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