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AbstractA theory of voting under federalism requires that attributions of responsibility moderate the strength of retrospective voting. Scholars have spotty evidence that voters do this but put this down to the effects of institutions and citizens' capabilities. I show thatpoliticalvariation also affects electoral accountability. Using panel surveys across provincial and federal elections and qualitative media content analysis, I show that voters only live up to a federal theory of voting when governments make policy changes independent of the other level and those changes and their consequences are prominent in political discourse. Federal institutions affect electoral accountability through the politics that they generate.

Conventional wisdom has it that elections other than national ones are second-order elections, driven by political conditions in the first-order national arena. It has not yet been shown that a sub- or supra-national election can exhibit qualities similar to those of first-order elections. This paper uses the 2003 Ontario Election Study, from a provincial election in extremely decentralized federation, to demonstrate that a sub-national election can be a first-order election. Aggregate evidence shows voters' interest and turnout is comparable to national elections. Individual-level evidence shows vote choice is determined by arena-specific factors. And dynamic evidence shows that this sub-national campaign had its own homegrown events that influenced voters, just as campaign events influence national elections. [Copyright 2008 Elsevier Ltd.]

Abstract.Government accountability in Canada depends on Canadian voters' attributing responsibility to multiple levels of government for policy outcomes. This study presents the first comprehensive account of these responsibility judgments. The data are from panel surveys of voters in Ontario and Saskatchewan as they faced provincial elections in the fall of 2003 and then the federal election of 2004. Voters were asked about conditions in a number of policy areas and then asked to separately attribute responsibility to the two senior levels of government. Voters do not strongly differentiate the governments' roles and there is little variation across issues. Attentiveness to politics only very slightly improves the quality of responsibility attributions, and only on issues where responsibility is objectively clearer. The results suggest that federalism is a major challenge for Canadian voters wishing to reward or punish their governments for policy outcomes.Résumé.La responsabilisation gouvernementale au Canada dépend de la capacité du citoyen à différencier clairement les sphères d'activité des divers paliers de gouvernement. Cette étude offre, pour la première fois, un portrait exhaustif des mécanismes d'attribution de la responsabilité dans le système fédéral canadien. Les données sont tirées de deux enquêtes en panel réalisées durant les campagnes électorales provinciales de l'Ontario et de la Saskatchewan à l'automne 2003, puis durant la campagne fédérale de 2004. Deux aspects principaux de ces enquêtes ont été retenus pour cette étude. Tout d'abord, les répondants ont été interrogés sur leur perception de l'état des choses quant à une série d'enjeux de politique publique (économie, système de santé, et ainsi de suite). Ils ont ensuite dû attribuer la responsabilité de ces politiques aux deux paliers supérieurs de gouvernement au Canada. Il s'avère que les électeurs ne différencient que faiblement le rôle de chaque palier de gouvernement et ce, quel que soit l'enjeu. La capacité d'attribution de la responsabilité n'est que légèrement affectée par le niveau d'attention à la politique de l'électeur. Les résultats de l'analyse suggèrent que la nature fédérale du système politique canadien demeure un défi important à surmonter pour l'électeur qui désire récompenser ou punir ses gouvernements pour une politique publique donnée.

The fortunes of local, regional and provincial economies have often been linked to geographical variation in electoral outcomes, and nowhere more so than in Canada. This article examines economic localism in Canadian voting behaviour by estimating a model of voters' decisions in the 1993 and 1997 federal elections. Individual-specific determinants of the vote measured in the Canadian Election Study are supplemented by measures of voters' local economies and of the local impacts of policy changes. Voters punish the federal government for bad times in their locale and for policy changes that hurt the local economy. This effect is independent of what voters think about their own finances and about the provincial and national economies. The electoral impact of the local economy does not depend on whether government is acknowledged as a potent economic actor, or on the voter's level of political information. However, the relevance of the local economy for national-level electoral behaviour can be "primed" by campaign events, just like any other criterion of voting choice. The response to local economic conditions is part of a broader explanation for geographic patterns of electoral support in Canada.