Presidential Success and the World Economy

Economic voting is a widely accepted regularity in the political science literature, yet most work on the subject either assumes that economic performance is a direct result of policy making or, more recently, argues that voters are able to identify when this is not the case. Our article challenges these claims by showing that, in a large subset of Latin American countries, both presidential popularity and prospects of reelection strongly depend on factors unambiguously exogenous to presidents' policy choices. These findings advance the literature on assignment of responsibility for economic performance and pose important implications for democratic accountability.