Challengers and Electoral Accountability

Formal theories of accountability try to capture this idea, modeling elections in which the threat of removal may keep the incumbent in line. A viable challenger is crucial for this to work, because the voter’s threat to remove the incumbent is not credible if the outside option is unacceptable. In almost all existing models, however, the challenger is completely passive, so the models (by construction) overlook key tasks that challengers perform, such as criticizing the incumbent’s performance. The importance of analyzing challengers as active players, rather than passive replacements, is underscored by V.O. Key’s oft-cited passage: