Political Accountability and Institutional Design in New Democracies

The article tests the commonly accepted political science wisdom about the effects of institutional design, namely, that presidential systems and/or parliamentary ones elected under the electoral rules of plurality/majority singlemember districts (SMDs) contribute to the accountability of a democratic system, while those under parliamentary proportional representation (PR) systems enhance political representation. In the literature this proposition involves macrolevel attempts to test the way institutions work at the micro level by tracing the institutional effects on individuals, that is, at the level of individuals' cognition, attitudes, and disposition to behave in a certain way in accordance with the institutional design. The data come from a dozen newly democratized countries of East Central Europe at two points in time. The general result and several detailed analyses demonstrate that the presumed common wisdom does not apply. Quite to the contrary, people living under presidential or majoritarian SMD systems reveal far lower "accountability assets" (the term used in this article) than those living in parliamentary PR democracies, at least in the East Central European countries.