Replication Data for: The Road to Reelection is Paved with Good Intentions: Experiments on the Role of Outcomes and Intentions in Voting Behavior

Incumbents regularly take actions that they believe will produce good outcomes for voters, but given that incumbents do not have perfect control over policy outcomes, sometimes good intentions lead to unintended bad outcomes. An important question for democratic accountability is whether voters take intentions into consideration or if they are solely focused on outcomes. We propose an outcome-intention hypothesis in which voters reward an incumbent for both good outcomes and good intentions. To investigate this hypothesis, we use a series of incentivized experiments where participants took the role of voters who experienced a better or worse policy outcome. Voters were randomly assigned to additionally receive information about an incumbent’s intended policy outcome. We find that voters reward incumbents for good outcomes and good intentions. However, when we introduce group competition, voters only reward the good intentions of in-group incumbents.

在任公职人员通常会采取其认为能为选民带来良好结果的行动，但鉴于其无法完全掌控政策结果，有时良好的执政初衷反而会引发非预期的负面结果。民主问责领域的一个核心议题是：选民是否会考量执政者的初衷，还是仅关注政策结果本身？为此我们提出「结果-初衷假说」（outcome-intention hypothesis），该假说指出，选民会同时依据良好的政策结果与良好的执政初衷对在任公职人员予以奖励。为验证这一假说，我们设计了一系列激励型实验：实验参与者将扮演选民，体验或优或劣的政策结果。其中部分选民会被随机分配，额外获取关于在任公职人员预期政策结果的信息。实验结果表明，选民确实会因良好的政策结果与良好的初衷奖励在任公职人员。但当引入群体竞争情境后，选民仅会奖励同群体内在任公职人员的良好初衷。