The Accountability of Missed Opportunities: Electoral punishments from public infrastructure expansion

Álvaro San Román del Pozuelo

No fuez5_v1, SocArXiv from Center for Open Science

Abstract: Can public goods expansion generate electoral backlash against incumbents? Do voters hold incumbents accountable for policies from which they derive no direct benefit? Conventional accountability models suggest that public goods provision rewards incumbents, yet the dynamics through which grievances translate into punishment remain both theoretically underdeveloped and empirically underexplored. This paper explores how infrastructure construction can provoke voter backlash in areas unaffected by new developments. Infrastructure provision has inherent characteristics that create particular scenarios for accountability. The visibility and salience of infrastructure, coupled with its differentiated, non-universal spatial impacts and slow expansion, set the stage for territorial competition across constituencies. When policymakers decide the location of new facilities, non-winners are confronted with a tangible counterfactual: the opportunity to enhance their own situation. The perception of having missed a chance to benefit—rather than material loss per se—is at the core of their grievance and becomes the main motivation to punish the incumbent responsible. Using a novel dataset on hospital construction in Spain (2002–2019) and municipality-level electoral results, I analyze how the allocation of 81 new hospitals affected support for regional incumbents. Compared with regions without hospital expansion, municipalities whose accessibility improved increased their support for the incumbent by 2.14 percentage points, whereas non-impacted municipalities reduced it by 1.85 points. Punishments manifest both as lower turnout (-2.26 pp) and as gains for opposition parties (+0.81 pp). Contrary to expectations, however, these punishments do not vary with prior accessibility. This study provides insights into nuanced electoral dynamics around public goods, emphasizing the critical role of unequal allocations in shaping electoral accountability.

Date: 2026-10-22
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:socarx:fuez5_v1

DOI: 10.31235/osf.io/fuez5_v1

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