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.