Record Details

How Voters Use Contextual Information to Reward and Punish: Credit Claiming, Legislative Performance, and Democratic Accountability

Harvard Dataverse (Africa Rice Center, Bioversity International, CCAFS, CIAT, IFPRI, IRRI and WorldFish)

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Title How Voters Use Contextual Information to Reward and Punish: Credit Claiming, Legislative Performance, and Democratic Accountability
 
Identifier https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/X5RBRB
 
Creator Eric Patashnik
 
Publisher Harvard Dataverse
 
Description Some studies have found that constituents do not evaluate legislators more favorably
for claiming credit for delivering large grants than for claiming credit for delivering tiny
ones. It remains unclear, however, whether the lack of sensitivity to the amount of
money claimed reflects innumeracy or the difficulty that many people have
understanding the size of a government expenditure in the abstract. We perform a
survey experiment in which we give respondents information about both the absolute
and relative size of projects. We find that subjects evaluate legislators significantly
more favorably for claiming credit for relatively large projects. Our results suggest that
subjects are responsive to the magnitudes in claims of accomplishment, but only when
provided a benchmark. We also find evidence of an asymmetric effect; subjects are
more inclined to punish legislators for delivering grants of below average size than to
reward them for delivering grants of above average size
 
Subject Social Sciences
 
Contributor Asadzadehmamaghani, Peyman