Who Gets Credit? Citizen Responses to Local Public Goods

• In Event: The Consequences of Credit Claiming (Pre-Recorded)

Abstract

In decentralized systems, citizens struggle to properly identify which level of government is responsible for providing different local goods. This inability to attribute responsibility creates challenges for electoral accountability. Who should citizens reward for providing local goods? Understanding to whom citizens assign credit is particularly important in the context of weak political parties. When parties are strong, the literature has shown that national politicians will tend to assign goods to areas controlled by their co-partisans. In these cases, the party will get credit, benefitting politicians at both levels. Where parties are weak, however, party identification is less meaningful. As a result, national level politicians may secure local goods for areas that are not controlled by co-partisans. When citizens cannot reward the party, do they reward the local or national politician?

In this paper, I argue that citizens perceptions of who should receive credit and be rewarded for local improvements depends on signals from their local-level politician. Thus, who citizens assign credit to, and whether this affects voting behavior, will change based on how local politicians signal information about responsibility. I ran a vignette survey experiment in Colombia focused on credit attribution and voter behavior. I find that citizens are more likely to properly assign credit when the local politician signals that a national politician helped secure a local good. When citizens receive this information, they expect the vote share of a national politician to increase, but they do not expect changes in vote share for local-level politicians.

Author

• Katherine Marie McKiernan, Tulane University