The Impression of Influence: How Legislator Communication and
Government Spending Cultivate a Personal Vote
Justin Grimmer
∗
Sean J. Westwood
†
Solomon Messing
‡
May 10, 2013
Overview
For decades, scholars of Congress argued that representatives use federal spending to cultivate constituent support. This literature supposes that constituents are accountants who reward members
of Congress for each dollar spent in the district or each new project initiated. In spite of the
intuitive appeal of this argument, there are few explanations of how constituents reward elected
officials for spending. This is problematic because most constituents struggle to correctly identify
and tabulate spending in the district. Constituents generally lack the incentive, knowledge, and
context to reward representatives for spending in the district. Moreover, the structure of federal
spending ensures that many elected officials could be rewarded for spending projects.
In The Impression of Influence we offer a drastically different explanation of how government
spending builds support for incumbents. Rather than behaving like accountants who tabulate total
expenditures to reward legislators, constituents reward legislators for the impression they influence
expenditures in the district. To create this impression, legislators strategically use credit claiming
messages to associate themselves with spending projects in the district. Constituents evaluate the
credit claiming messages intuitively. The result is that constituents are responsive to legislators’
credit claiming efforts, but in ways that imply only a loose association between the actual spending in a district and the allocation of credit to legislators. This impressionistic model of credit
allocation not only explains how legislators cultivate a personal vote. It also explains how federal
spending occurs, how bureaucrats cultivate support for their programs, and how partisan criticism
for spending undermines the credit legislators receive.
To create the impression they are broadly influential over expenditures, legislators engage in sustained publicity efforts. When publicizing their work to constituents, we show that legislators claim
credit for more than actual expenditures in the district. Legislators also regularly claim credit for
requesting expenditures and use carefully worded statements to claim credit for spending that occurs through bureaucratic programs, even when representatives exercise little direct influence over
∗
Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Stanford University; Encina Hall West 616 Serra St., Stanford, CA, 94305
†
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Communication, Stanford University; 450 Serra Mall, Building 120, Room 110,
Stanford, CA, 94305
‡
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Communication, Stanford University; 450 Serra Mall, Building 120, Room 110,
Stanford, CA, 94305
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that spending.
The impressions that legislators create affect how constituents reward legislators for spending:
legislator credit claiming directly affects constituent credit allocation. Building on experimental
evidence we first introduced in our paper “How Words and Money Cultivate a Personal Vote: The
Effect of Legislators Credit Claiming on Constituent Credit Allocation” (American Political Science Review, 106, (4)) we show how constituents reward legislators’ actions as portrayed in credit
claiming statements, even if those actions are not immediately related to spending in the district.
The result is that the credit constituents allocate for government spending is only loosely related
to the amount actually spent. Our experiments show that constituents are more responsive to
increasing the number of credit claiming messages than increasing the amount of money claimed
in any one message. And constituents reward legislators for requesting money, even if no money is
actually spent in the district.
Therefore, credit claiming opportunities are valuable to legislators, even if the legislator is not responsible for an actual expenditure. The value of merely announcing an expenditure helps explain
how bureaucrats at small programs maintain Congressional support. Scholars have long struggled
to explain how the many small federal programs maintain political support (Lowi, 1979; Stein
and Bickers, 1997). Using a detailed case study, we show how bureaucrats create credit claiming
opportunities for legislators to cultivate support for the bureaucrat’s program, even though bureaucrats are unable to manipulate grant awards. And we show legislators regularly take advantage
of the opportunity, claiming credit for the grant awards using subtly deceptive language. Using
experimental evidence, we show this deception causes legislators to receive credit for the spending,
because constituents intuitively infer that legislators are responsible for spending.
Our impressionistic model of credit allocation also explains how criticism of spending undermines
the support legislators receive. With the election of Barack Obama the Tea Party movement pressured Republican incumbents to avoid credit claiming and, we show, engage in more criticism of
spending. We use experimental evidence to show that constituents do not consider the budget
consequences of spending unless explicitly informed, but when informed about negative budget
consequences, constituents punish the legislator and are less supportive of spending projects. The
result, we show, is that the Tea Party’s criticism of spending undermined support for Democrats
in the 2010 Congressional elections—partially explaining the Democrats’ poor performance.
The Impression of Influence provides a new political theory of how spending builds a personal vote
and the consequences for political representation, political institutions, the political economy of
government spending, and political behavior. The results are of interest to a wide range of subfields within American politics, the study of public good provision and clientelism in comparative
politics, political communication, and the study of public investments in economics. Our work
is also of interest to the political methodology community: we introduce new techniques for the
analysis of political texts, experimental techniques that allow us to replicate how legislators publicize
their work, and statistical methods to make precise inferences about who is affected by legislators’
credit claiming messages.
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Chapter Outline
Chapter 1: Representation and Impressions
The book opens with a vignette about Stephanie Herseth-Sandlin (D-SD)—and how she cultivates an impression of influence over spending when interacting with constituents. Herseth-Sandlin
directs spending to her district and she engages in regular publicity efforts to ensure that constituents learn about the projects, claiming credit in public statements and in public appearances.
This includes major projects—such as a major renovation of a national guard base. But the credit
claiming extends to seemingly inconsequential grants and small projects: Herseth-Sandlin regularly
announces grants as small as $13,000 for local fire departments.
The case of Herseth-Sandlin demonstrates how legislators create an impression of influence. They
associate themselves with spending that occurs in the district, leading constituents to infer that
their member of Congress is responsible for the expenditures. Building on the vignette, this chapter
introduces our political explanation of how legislators ensure they receive credit for spending in
the district. This political explanation contributes to our understanding of how representation
occurs. Rather than constituents rewarding legislators on an objective standard—such as the
money spent in the district— we show how legislators create impressions that lead to constituent
support. This creates new normative concerns about deception in political representation. We
also introduce the consequences of our impression based model of credit allocation for budgetary
politics—explaining puzzles in Congressional-bureaucratic relationships and how budget criticism
undermines legislators’ credit.
Chapter 2: The Impressionistic Model of Credit Claiming
This chapter advances our impression based theory of how constituents allocate credit for spending.
We begin by outlining the current conventional wisdom, the accountant theory of credit allocation.
In introducing this standard theory of credit allocation, we also explain why it does a poor job
of explaining how money spent in the district leads to support for incumbents. The accountant
model supposes constituents carefully monitor how legislators deliver money to the district. Yet,
constituents often fail to have the information, context, and motivation to evaluate spending in the
way the accountant model assumes. We also show that tests of the accountant model are based on
flawed data: delays in the delivery of earmarked funds and measurement error in where grants are
spent cause large biases in the measured effects of spending.
In place of the accountant model, we explain why impressions are likely to determine how constituents allocate credit for expenditures. With constituents’ limited attention, legislators are forced
to use public statements to receive credit for spending. But not all legislators have equal incentive
to create this impression. Rather, building off of prior work, we explain how legislators’ electoral
incentives cause legislators to vary their focus on federal expenditures.
When legislators create an impression they claim credit for more than just expenditures in the
district. Legislators also announce work performed in Washington that could lead to expenditures
and legislators use ambiguous language to imply they are responsible for securing money they had
no direct role in obtaining. Together, the impression based model of credit claiming predicts only a
loose relationship between money spent in the district and the credit constituents allocate to their
members of Congress. Instead, we expect that legislators’ credit claiming and the money spent in
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the district affect how much credit legislators receive for spending. The result: legislators value the
opportunity to associate themselves with spending in the district, apart from new spending.
Chapter 3: How Legislators Cultivate an Impression of Influence
To understand what legislators claim credit for and how often they claim credit for expenditures,
we engage in a large scale analysis of legislators’ publicity efforts, coupled with case studies of
how particular legislators claim credit for spending. We show that legislators claim credit broadly
and use subtle language to cultivate an impression of influence. We also demonstrate systematic
variation in the rate of credit claiming across legislators and the substantial variation in the type
of credit that is claimed. Some legislators emphasize their work in Washington. Other legislators
regularly announce grant allocations through bureaucratic programs. And still others emphasize
their work requesting funds for the district. Actual expenditures, then, are only one source of the
statements legislators use to cultivate an impression of influence.
Chapter 4: Creating an Impression, Not Just Increasing Name Recognition
Credit claiming messages, we argue in Chapter 2, cultivate an impression that legislators are influential in delivering money to the district. Before explaining how the messages create this impression,
we first demonstrate that the effects of credit claiming messages are distinct from other types of
statements—credit claiming messages do more than simply raise an incumbent’s name recognition
(Cain, Ferejohn, and Fiorina 1987). We present results from an original experiment conducted in
a setting where constituents actually receive credit claiming messages—through messages posted
on a popular social media platform. Our results demonstrate that credit claiming messages help
legislators to create an impression of influence and are more effective at cultivating support than
other non-partisan messages.
Chapter 5: Cultivating an Impression of Influence with Actions and Small Expenditures
This chapter explains why constituents reward legislators for an impression of influence over spending. Using both survey experiments on a nationally representative sample and experiments conducted in contexts where legislators actually claim credit for spending we show that constituents
struggle to reason quantitatively, but constituents more easily evaluate legislators’ actions. The
result is that constituents are relatively unresponsive to how much legislators claim credit for, but
are very responsive to repeated credit claiming messages. In fact, we show that legislators are able
to create an impression of influence by claiming credit for requesting funds or even announcing
their intention to address a problem.
Chapter 6: The Impression of Influence and the Abundance of Federal Grant
Programs
In this chapter we show that the value of claiming credit for mere actions and the opportunity
to imply influence over expenditures helps explain a long standing puzzle in American political
economy. Federal expenditures occur through a large number of federal programs, with each of the
many programs administered by a small number of bureaucrats. While this structure of federal
spending evolved for diverse reasons, we show in this chapter that legislators’ strategic credit
claiming and constituents’ heuristic evaluation of credit claiming statements help explain how many
of the programs survive. Strategic bureaucrats create credit claiming opportunities for legislators,
which legislators value because constituents reward legislators for implications nearly as much as
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when credit claiming is explicit. In return for the credit claiming opportunities, legislators reward
bureaucrats with continued funding for their program. The result is that the many federal programs
are maintained and that legislators have a broader set of activities to claim credit for securing.
Chapter 7: How Deficit Implications Undermine Credit Allocation
This chapter shows how the Tea Party’s rise, and accompanying anti-spending rhetoric, may help
to explain why massive increases in particularistic spending that occurred with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, better known as the stimulus, did not boost support for Democrats.
We show how the Tea Party’s rise caused Republicans to both abandon credit claiming for particularistic spending and to adopt increasingly harsh criticism of the budget. And this budget
criticism undermined the effect of the stimulus on incumbent support. Using a pair of experiments
on nationally representative samples, we show that Tea Party criticism turned perceived prowess
over particularistic spending from an asset to a liability. Instead of voters seeing their member of
Congress as attentive to the district and its needs when credit claiming, voters saw their legislators
as wasteful spendthrifts.
Chapter 8: Conclusion: How Impressions Matter for Representation and Institutions
In this concluding chapter, we summarize the far reaching consequences of the impression based
model of credit allocation for the study of American politics. Legislators’ credit claiming statements create opportunities for deception that are subtle and difficult to detect. The result is that
legislators likely receive credit for spending they had little role in securing. This makes the tasks of
constituents in a democracy all the more difficult to perform. And it also shows that the personal
vote is built, in part, on systematic deception of the electorate. The limits of constituents and the
deceptions of legislators also help explain the proliferation of expenditure programs and continued
budget deficits.
References
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