Credit Claiming and Electoral Accountability in a Collaborative Congress

• In Event: Electoral Accountability

Abstract

Modern Congressional legislative work is often very collaborative. However, the institutional rules around bill sponsorship only allow one Member of Congress to be the official sponsor and require all others to be cosponsors. Does this create challenges for Members of Congress as they seek to claim credit with constituents for their legislative work? We investigate this question from the perspective of both MCs and constituents. First, we code a random sample of 22,000 Congressional press releases from the 109-11th Congresses to find instances of credit claiming regarding legislative action and validate these claims against bill history. We find that 40% of the legislative successes that Members claim credit for are for something other than a bill they formally sponsored; they regularly claim credit for cosponsorship, amendments, and authoring text in another’s bill. This highlights how much of their work is collaborative. Yet, 21% of the time they explicitly claim sponsorship of a bill in their press release, they were not the bill’s formal sponsor—this typically happens in instances of cosponsored legislation, suggesting that MCs find the distinction between sponsorship and cosponsorship limiting as they communicate with constituents. Second, we test whether constituents respond more or less favorably to sponsorship than other more collaborative legislative contributions. To do so, we run a survey experiment on the 2023 Cooperative Election Study that measures constituents’ evaluations of MC’s when they claim sponsorship vs cosponsorship on a variety of legislative issues. From these findings, we build a theory of legislative credit claiming and electoral accountability in a modern, collaborative Congress.

Authors

• Jessica Robinson Preece, Brigham Young University

• Kesley Townsend