Electoral results affect beliefs about the past: Evidence from Chile

Abstract

Can electoral outcomes shape voters' perceptions of the past? We argue that electoral outcomes provide informational cues that prompt voters to reinterpret prior conditions, shifting the benchmarks on which accountability rests. We focus on perceptions of crime, a valence issue that voters likely take into account when choosing any candidate. We propose that perceptions of crime change immediately after an election, as voters reinterpret prior conditions through the lens of the relevance of crime in the winning candidate's platform. We leverage the timing of opinion surveys in Chile on public security to compare respondents interviewed just before and just after local elections, across municipalities where a right-wing mayor narrowly won versus narrowly lost. We show that shortly after a local right-wing candidate wins by a small margin, respondents report that their neighborhood, state, and country are less safe than those who answered the same survey a few days before the election. Victimization, which is unlikely to be misremembered, does not vary across groups of respondents. The findings show that this shift in perceptions directly affects electoral accountability: When political outcomes shape beliefs about past performance, accountability itself becomes endogenous to electoral results.