This mechanism resembles what political scientists call “retrospective voting.”68 Its novel feature is the perverse trade-off between policies and outcomes. In most retrospective voting models, voters are agnostic about policy, and judge politicians purely for their observable success. Leaders’ dominant strategy is therefore to implement the most effective policies.69 This is no longer true, however, if voters “know what ain’t so”—if they want specific policies but resent their predictable consequences.
