It's the Effort That Counts? Constituent Responses to Earmark Requests

• In Event: Legislators and Their Constituents

Abstract

Working to secure resources for the district is an essential way in which legislators engage in representation. However, not all of these attempts are successful. Do constituents reward effort in securing resources or only success? In this project, we take advantage of transparency reforms to create a new dataset of all requests for earmarks made by members of the U.S. House in the 117th Congress and match these requests to the actual allocations approved in the House budgets. Pairing these data with constituency-level evaluations of representatives from the CES, we assess how the public responds to legislator effort and success in securing earmarks. We then conduct a survey experiment to further study how successful and failed attempts to secure funding influence constituent evaluations. Our project provides new insight into how the American public rewards legislative effort and illuminates the strategic incentives representatives face in selling their attempts to secure scarce resources.

Authors

• Jaclyn Kaslovsky, Washington University in St. Louis

• Andrew R Stone, University of Mississippi