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

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