The effects of congressional rules about bill cosponsorship on duplicate bills: Changing incentives for credit claiming

This chapter explores the implications of this study's argument for representation. The credit-claiming, credit allocation process that this study characterizes enables accountability, but it also forces one to reconsider one's priorities in representation and how one might privilege transparent communication at the expense of efficient policy outcomes, and vice versa. If one prioritizes truthful and transparent discussion, then the credit-claiming, credit allocation process is problematic. The chapter then suggests some reforms in reporting and congressional credit claiming that could make the process more transparent and limit legislators' ability to engage in systematic deception. It also explains how this study could be extended, and highlights yet-to-be-answered questions about how legislators build support.

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Credit, Deception, and Institutional Design

The Impression of Influence ◽

10.23943/princeton/9780691162614.003.0006 ◽

2014 ◽

Author(s):

Justin Grimmer ◽

Sean J. Westwood ◽

Solomon Messing

Keyword(s):

Institutional Design ◽

Credit Claiming

This chapter shows how legislators—with the help of a subtle linguistic deception and strategic bureaucrats—claim credit for grants that the representative had only an indirect role in securing. Bureaucrats create credit-claiming opportunities to cultivate support for their program, particularly when the bureaucrats are otherwise unable to manipulate grant decisions. Legislators take advantage of the opportunity to announce the expenditure, while never explicitly taking credit. This linguistic deception is effective, leading constituents to believe that legislators who only “announce” a grant are responsible for securing it. Once it is revealed that legislators are only implying they deserve credit, however, legislators' credit is decimated.

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Creating an Impression, Not Just Increasing Name Recognition

The Impression of Influence ◽

10.23943/princeton/9780691162614.003.0004 ◽

2014 ◽

Author(s):

Justin Grimmer ◽

Sean J. Westwood ◽

Solomon Messing

Keyword(s):

Social Media ◽

Experimental Design ◽

Federal Funds ◽

Credit Claiming

This chapter demonstrates that legislators' credit-claiming efforts do more than simply bolster name recognition—they also cultivate an impression of influence over federal funds. It examines the results of an experiment conducted on a major social media website—a setting where constituents regularly receive messages like the ones used in this book's experiment from their member of Congress. Using this study's experimental design, the chapter shows that credit-claiming messages do make constituents more familiar with their representative, but the credit-claiming messages also lead constituents to infer that their legislator is more effective at delivering money to the district. The result is that credit-claiming messages cause a larger increase in overall support than other types of messages.

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The Politics of Fiscal Squeeze

When the Party’s Over ◽

10.5871/bacad/9780197265734.003.0001 ◽

2014 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

David Heald ◽

Christopher Hood

Keyword(s):

Public Finances ◽

The Public ◽

Different Types ◽

Blame Avoidance ◽

Credit Claiming

This chapter conceives ‘fiscal squeeze’ as political effort to correct the public finances by raising taxes or cutting spending (or both), distinguishing different types of squeeze. It poses three questions about such squeezes, namely whether there is something special about the politics of austerity or retrenchment, whether fiscal squeeze presents credit-claiming opportunities or severe blame-avoidance challenges to elected governments, and how consequential the effects of fiscal squeezes are. It argues that to put fiscal squeezes into perspective we need to observe what else is happening in the relevant country and in the outside world, to examine what happened afterwards, and to compare fiscal squeezes with one another to see what, if any, common patterns they display. It introduces nine different cases of fiscal squeeze in democracies ranging from the early 1800s to the early 2000s. Each of those cases can be seen as puzzling or contested in some way.

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Why don’t citizens give governments credit when they deliver on electoral pledges?

Policy & Politics ◽

10.1332/030557320x15786201228120 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 48 (3) ◽

pp. 503-519

Author(s):

Pascal D. König ◽

Markus B. Siewert

Keyword(s):

Public Sphere ◽

Political System ◽

Analytical Framework ◽

The Political ◽

Democratic Institutions ◽

Liberal Democracies ◽

The Media ◽

Credit Claiming

Why don’t citizens give governments credit when they deliver on electoral pledges? This article develops an original analytical framework that addresses this important but under-researched question. It focuses on the concept of ‘credit claiming’, which is the opposite of ‘blame shifting’, and draws together existing research to identify a number of significant hurdles that governments must overcome in order to gain recognition for achievements. It highlights the challenges which policymakers face in communicating with citizens in an increasingly mediatised public sphere, and the extent to which their credit claiming efforts rely on the media as a ‘transmission belt’. It concludes that in liberal democracies governments are fighting an uphill battle to gain citizens’ support and secure trust in broader democratic institutions and the political system as a whole.

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The Birth of Pork: Local Appropriations in America’s First Century

American Political Science Review ◽

10.1017/s000305541800014x ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 112 (3) ◽

pp. 564-579 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

SANFORD C. GORDON ◽

HANNAH K. SIMPSON

Keyword(s):

First Century ◽

Distributive Politics ◽

Historical Period ◽

Pork Barrel ◽

Historical Factors ◽

Credit Claiming ◽

Ideological Structure ◽

The U.S

After describing a newly assembled dataset consisting of almost 9,000 local appropriations made by the U.S. Congress between 1789 and 1882, we test competing accounts of the politics surrounding them before offering a more nuanced, historically contingent view of the emergence of the pork barrel. We demonstrate that for most of this historical period—despite contemporary accusations of crass electoral motives—the pattern of appropriations is largely inconsistent with accounts of distributive politics grounded in a logic of legislative credit-claiming. Instead, support for appropriations in the House mapped cleanly onto the partisan/ideological structure of Congress for most of this period, and only in the 1870s produced the universalistic coalitions commonly associated with pork-barrel spending. We trace this shift to two historical factors: the emergence of a solid Democratic South, and growth in the fraction of appropriations funding recurrent expenditures on extant projects rather than new starts.

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From Claiming Credit to Avoiding Blame: The Evolution of Congressional Strategy for Asbestos Management

Journal of Public Policy ◽

10.1017/s0143814x00006188 ◽

1991 ◽

Vol 11 (2) ◽

pp. 153-186 ◽

Cited By ~ 20

Author(s):

Charlotte Twight

Keyword(s):

Public Policy ◽

Early Stage ◽

The United States ◽

Public Perceptions ◽

Information Costs ◽

The Public ◽

Congressional Behavior ◽

The Us ◽

Blame Avoidance ◽

Credit Claiming

ABSTRACTThis paper develops a theory synthesizing credit-claiming and blameavoidance explanations of congressional behavior and evaluates it against asbestos policy in the United States from the 1920s through the 1980s. Public policy is viewed as shaped by officeholders' ability to achieve political ends through augmenting information costs and other transaction costs facing the public. Public perceptions are seen both as the endogenous product of congressional information-cost manipulation and as an exogenous constraint that changes in identifiable ways over time. Different policy stances - open credit claiming, concealed credit claiming, early-stage blame avoidance, and full-scale blame avoidance – are predicted to emerge in response to specified conditions, yielding implications about the expected timing of public policy changes. Specific types of transaction-cost manipulation are predicted to accompany the identified policy stances. The US asbestos policy experience is shown to be consistent with the predictions of the model.

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Bypassing the Enemy: Distributive Politics, Credit Claiming, and Nonstate Organizations in Brazil

Comparative Political Studies ◽

10.1177/0010414017710255 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 51 (3) ◽

pp. 304-340 ◽

Cited By ~ 7

Author(s):

Natália S. Bueno

Keyword(s):

Survey Data ◽

Government Spending ◽

Central Government ◽

Regression Discontinuity ◽

Distributive Politics ◽

Regression Discontinuity Design ◽

Effective Strategy ◽

Government Programs ◽

Credit Claiming ◽

Original Survey

How do incumbents prevent the opposition from claiming credit for government programs? The received scholarly wisdom is that central government authorities favor copartisans in lower tiers of government to reward allies and punish opponents. Yet this depiction ignores the range of strategies available to incumbents at the center. I argue that another effective strategy is to channel resources through nonstate organizations, thus bypassing the opposition and reducing “credit hijacking.” Using a regression-discontinuity design with data from Brazil, I show that mayors from the president’s party receive more resources, but that the election of an opposition mayor induces the central government to shift resources to nonstate organizations that operate in the locality. Original survey data, fieldwork, and data on organizations’ leaders support the claim that opposition mayors do not hijack credit from government spending through nonstate organizations.

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