When oversight is contested, citizens are less likely to hold incumbents accountable

A new study suggests democratic backsliding can occur when individuals doubt the intent behind oversight bodies’ criticisms.

By Sarah Steimer

Citizens do not directly observe politicians’ efforts to undermine democracy. Instead, they must rely on researchers, reporters, and other third-party oversight bodies to detect and make them aware of democratic backsliding. While this keeps citizens out of the dark on government actions, the spotlight can also become distrusted. A new study published in Political Science Research & Methods, finds that when an oversight body is contested, individuals may doubt the intent behind the criticisms, thus potentially allowing for democratic backsliding.

Robert Gulotty, an associate professor of Political Science, and Zhaotian Luo, an assistant professor of Political Science, wanted to explore why it appeared that warnings from oversight bodies did not always spur corrective actions. For example, the authors point to the media’s persistent tracking of President Donald Trump’s falsehoods: These fact checks failed to deter the behavior that they were criticizing. 

To explore the issue, the researchers created a game theory model with three players: citizens, incumbents, and oversight bodies. They began with a model of electoral accountability, in which a citizen may remove the backsliding incumbent, thus deterring an incumbent from such actions. 

Uncertainty about whether a controversy amounts to backsliding was then introduced: Should citizens hear of a controversy, they must still decide whether there are sufficient grounds to act. The choice becomes more difficult when controversial policy choices or rhetoric are ambiguous — is it subversive and worthy of removal, or non-subversive and excusable? Prior literature explored the effects of an incumbent’s clean actions or subversive actions, but their model now introduced the idea of non-subversive action. 

“That action is interesting in the sense that it is nothing as serious as the subversive action,” Luo explains. “It's not actually harming the citizen, but at the same time, it is not as distinguishable as the clean action. It's an action in the gray area.” He gives the example of Trump wanting to add himself to Mount Rushmore. It doesn’t necessarily harm citizens, but it’s unclear whether this could be viewed as a power grab.

The model emphasizes two ways that backsliding may not be obvious to the citizen. The first is backsliding by stealth: A power grab may not go noticed and corruption can go undetected, until it is. An example here would be President Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal, which led to his removal. The second form of nonobvious backsliding is under the cover of an excuse: Citizens must both hear the criticism, be alerted to suspicious behavior, and also believe that accusations are accurate. The latter is a difficult task for citizens both because institutional degradation can be hard to evaluate, but also because individuals may be uncertain about the intention of the oversight body issuing the criticism. In other words, they may not be moved if incumbents make claims of “fake news.” When oversight is contested by the incumbent, voters use this criticism to decide whether the oversight body is malicious, thus raising a dual inference problem and creating a strategic dilemma for oversight bodies in how or when to alert citizens of particular behaviors.

The issue begins with the behavior of responsible oversight, which engages in caution to try to make their warnings credible. This creates a problem. “If you're a citizen or a voter, and you're hearing criticism, the good type [of oversight] is cautious: They're not likely to send that signal,” Gulotty says. “Who is likely to send that kind of signal? The kind of oversight that's out to get the president. And so you end up learning more about the fact that these guys are out to get [the incumbent] whenever you hear criticism than you learn about the criticism itself, because anybody who is actually offering informative criticism would be very seldomly sending it. We call that the fake news effect, in which people believe that the criticism is because of fake news.”

In the paper, the researchers distinguish cases of effective and ineffective oversight by the effects it has on incumbent behavior, voter learning, and the type of backsliding that occurs. They found that the effects of uncertainty over the incumbent’s action, along with the uncertainty regarding the intention of the oversight body, create a feedback loop with the ability of the oversight body to induce removal.

In an equilibrium with effective oversight, criticism guarantees removal, thus deterring actions that can be mistaken for subversion. When oversight is ineffective, however, warnings to citizens are ignored, the incumbent is undisciplined, and the incumbent takes actions that can be mistaken for subversion. The breakdown is caused by the dual demands on oversight: They must decide whether an action is subversive, and also act in a way that ensures its criticisms are believed. This need to be believed can lead to two types of oversight bodies, which creates the opportunity for new inferences on the part of the citizen. A non-malicious oversight body might act cautiously and require stronger evidence of subversion before issuing criticism. But caution also has a downside: From a citizen perspective, criticism is proportionally more likely to come from a malicious oversight body. Together, the caution and fake news effects turn the oversight body against itself: In an effort to adjust to avoid raising false alarms, any criticism can sound like a witch-hunt.

The effects of caution and making dual inferences arise in many cases of intermediated learning, Gulotty and Luo say. Thus, the study underscores some of the limitations of formal or legal constraints on power, and the threat posed to democratic institutions when oversight bodies' ability to operate is threatened.

This type of equilibrium is self-sustaining, and relies on norms to be reestablished, in which citizens hold incumbents accountable for the backsliding identified by oversight bodies. But when incumbents engage in actions which, while not subversive, are possibly confused as such, the research suggests that backsliding is difficult to deter or correct.