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

Research has shown that constituents do not evaluate legislators more favorably for claiming credit for delivering large grants than for delivering tiny ones. It remains unclear whether the observed lack of sensitivity to the amount of money claimed reflects indifference to grant size or a lack of contextual information. Building on Grimmer et al.’s Impression of Influence, we perform a survey experiment in which we give respondents information about both the absolute and relative size of projects. We find that respondents evaluate legislators more favorably for claiming credit for relatively large projects. Our results suggest that subjects are responsive to the magnitudes in claims of legislative accomplishment when provided a benchmark. We also find that subjects are more inclined to punish legislators for delivering grants of below average size than they are to reward them for delivering grants of above average size, and we discuss possible mechanisms that could explain this asymmetric effect.