Survey Article: Unfounded Pessimism about Electoral Accountability

This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.As democratic theorists have worked to understand the failures of many democracies, some recent empirical work in political science (especially by Christopher Achen, Larry Bartels, and Martin Gilens) has proven enormously impactful. Many democratic theorists have concluded from this literature that citizens are too ignorant to hold office holders to account and that representative democracies are not responsive to ordinary citizens. We argue that these conclusions are unwarranted. They hinge on highly contestable interpretations of the work in question and conflict with important contrary findings that democratic theorists have ignored. If our argument is convincing, it should weaken the case for alternative regime types (e.g., lottocracy or epistocracy), which rests in part on empirically grounding the assertion that representative democracies cannot deliver meaningful accountability. Our argument also highlights the importance of engaging with the social scientific literature in a more careful and wide-ranging manner.