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Undergraduate Economic Review

Abstract

This paper characterises the vote which took place in the United Kingdom's (U.K.) 2015 General Election as an ‘accountability instrument.’ In doing so, the research interrogates which sections of the electorate hold the incumbent government more accountable for economic outcomes between the 2010 and 2015 U.K. General Elections. The Rational Choice Theory and the Michigan Model are used in this study to present two interlinked, and yet distinct, hypotheses – that less politically informed and non-partisan voters are more likely to hold the government accountable for economic performances; compared to the politically informed and partisan voters within the electorate. Implementing cross-sectional data from the British Election Survey (2015), this paper produces evidence contrary to its first hypothesis, instead illustrating that the politically informed held the government more accountable for economic performances within the 2015 Election. However, the evidence for the second hypothesis is not conclusive due to a high degree of partisan perception bias. Consequently, this paper provides evidence to expand the economic voting literature within the U.K., especially in terms of illustrating the heterogeneity of the economic vote, and evaluating which voters are more likely to hold the government accountable for economic performances following a General Election.

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