Credit Claiming and Accountability for Legislative Effectiveness

• In Event: The Politics of Legislatures

Brief Overview

We develop and test a theory of credit claiming and electoral accountability. Data on credit claiming by members of Congress and survey experiments suggest that low observability is to blame for credit claiming’s limited impact.

Authors

• Elizabeth N. Simas, Texas A&M University

• David James Hilden, University of Houston

• Michael Kistner, University of Houston

• Jamie Wright, Morning Consult