Endogenous Benchmarking and Government Accountability: Experimental Evidence from the COVID-19 Pandemic

When do cross-national comparisons enable citizens to hold governments accountable? According to recent work in comparative politics, benchmarking across borders is a powerful mechanism for making elections work. However, little attention has been paid to the choice of benchmarks and how they shape democratic accountability. We extend existing theories to account for endogenous benchmarking. Using the COVID-19 pandemic as a test case, we embedded experiments capturing self-selection and exogenous exposure to benchmark information from representative surveys in France, Germany, and the UK. The experiments reveal that when individuals have the choice, they are likely to seek out congruent information in line with their prior view of the government. Moreover, going beyond existing experiments on motivated reasoning and biased information choice, endogenous benchmarking occurs in all three countries despite the absence of partisan labels. Altogether, our results suggest that endogenous benchmarking weakens the democratic benefits of comparisons across borders.