It is well established that countries' institutional features can weaken economic voting by diffusing responsibility for policy outcomes. We argue that local-level party system institutionalization similarly mediates the link between the economy and vote choice. We focus on one dimension of party system institutionalization: the strength of party-candidate linkages in elections, measured by manually tracing the rerunning patterns of some 80,000 candidates in Indian state elections 1986-2007. Using rerunning patterns to measure party-candidate linkages and rainfall data to measure the state of the economy, we show that voters are more likely to reward incumbent parties for economic performance when parties and candidates are aligned in consecutive elections. We address concerns of endogeneity in rerunning patterns by showing that the results are robust to alternate measures of local-level party system institutionalization. They are also robust to alternative measures of the state of the economy, and using individual-level survey data.