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While the negative effect of partisanship on electoral accountability has been assumed in established Western democracies, its empirical test has been rare, especially for postcommunist democracies whose democratization processes are so distinct that their partisanship might deliver different political impacts from their Western counterparts. Through individual- and aggregate-level regressions, I find that partisanship, in general, does hurt electoral accountability at both levels. From a comparative perspective, the individual-level tests reveal that such a negative effect of partisanship has been more salient among the postcommunist voters with fewer electoral resources to rely on than among the Western voters whose abilities to hold the government accountable are stronger. At the aggregate level, however, this tendency becomes reversed as any increase in partisanship beyond its current relatively high level may induce the over-institutionalization of the Western party systems restricting electoral accountability, while it could rather help to stabilize the postcommunist party systems making it easier for voters to discern which political group is accountable for policy outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rational choice model of voting has been criticized for the fact that citizens expecting greater costs than the benefits associated with voting still turn out. This article focuses on the function of partisanship by which the effect of the rational calculation on voting is moderated. Previous studies have only tested the effect of partisanship on turnout additively failing to explore its interactions with the costs and benefits of voting. My multilevel analyses using the CSES data show that partisanship significantly moderates the effects of the information costs and intrinsic benefits of voting on turnout. These results, however, are not found in the postcommunist new democracies with unstable party systems hindering partisanship from serving as a political cue and from providing an expressive satisfaction of voting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]