those who manage to pass the state budget on time, controlling for a range of economic and political controls, as well as state and year fixed effects. We analyze voter responses to budget gridlock by comparing individual-level electoral outcomes for incumbent state legislators overseeing late budgets vs. Second, budget lateness is a conceptually simple and replicable measure of legislative gridlock, and it is comparable across states as well as time. Our proposed measure does not suffer from this problem, as the budget must be passed at regular intervals. First, any measure of gridlock should reflect both the supply and demand for legislation : while legislative passage of a limited number of bills could reflect gridlock, it could alternatively reflect a lack of demand for legislative action. Our measure of budget gridlock has two methodological advantages. Second, budget promptness, argued to be a key indicator of good government, rarely favors one party or political persuasion over the other. Failure to pass a budget on time often has visible consequences for citizens: while state legislatures in some cases pass temporary budgets allowing limited appropriations, other cases result in a shutdown of all non-essential services and interrupted payments to agencies, employees and state contractors. Although it does not encompass all types of legislative gridlock, this measure has several attractive features as an empirical operationalization of the broader phenomenon: first, the budget is the key piece of legislation for any legislature, and certainly so for US state legislatures. In this paper, we focus on electoral accountability for a specific set of gridlock instances: budget delays in US state governments. LegisIative gridlock also affects state governments: in 2009, the state of California had to resort to Registered Warrants (popularly known as IOUs) to cover payments, passing a budget 24 days into the fiscal year in 2010, the California budget was more than three months late.Ĭan voters hold lawmakers responsible for such lack of legislative productivity, or does gridlock constitute a system failure that electoral accountability cannot solve? Little is known about the electoral consequences of gridlock, both theoretically and empirically, partly due to disagreement over its measurement, partly due to a narrow focus on the case of the US Congress. Brief federal government shutdowns also occurred in January and February of 2018, while the federal shutdown of 2013 lasted 16 days and caused significant economic disruptions. The shutdown lasted 35 days, making it the longest in US history, and led to around 800,000 federal workers being furloughed or working without pay. In December 2018, the US federal government shut down when lawmakers failed to reach agreement on a budget or, at least, a continuing resolution. Legislative gridlock, the inability of legislative bodies to pass legislation, is a key concern of democratic politics. We find strong support for collective electoral accountability with voters punishing incumbent members of state legislature majority parties. Based on established theories of party organization in American politics, we develop three competing theoretical hypotheses to guide our understanding of the observed patterns of retrospective voting. We argue, based on evidence from twenty years of budget enactment data, that voters hold state legislators accountable for budget gridlock in US state governments, with gridlocked incumbents losing their seat more often than incumbents passing budgets on time. We focus on the passage of the government budget, the central task of any legislature, and define a legislature to experience budgetary gridlock if it fails to pass the budget on time. Can voters counter such political dysfunction? This paper examines whether and how voters hold politicians accountable for gridlock. Legislative gridlock is a failure of one of the key functions of government: to pass legislation.
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