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Who Gets Credit? Citizen Responses to Local Public Goods

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 November 2023

Katherine McKiernan Open the ORCID record for Katherine McKiernan [Opens in a new window]
Katherine McKiernan*
Affiliation:
Katherine McKiernan is a CIPR nonresident fellow at Tulane University, New Orleans LA, USA. katherinemckiernan@gmail.com.
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Abstract

In decentralized systems, citizens struggle to identify which level of government provides local goods. This problem is particularly salient in weakly institutionalized party environments, where politicians at different levels of government are less likely to benefit from partisan coattail effects. This article asks how citizens attribute credit for local public goods. I argue that citizens have a strong tendency to attribute credit to local politicians. As a result, citizens will respond differently to credit-claiming behavior by local and national politicians. Local politicians experience a ceiling effect, in which credit claiming has no effect on how citizens attribute credit. However, national politicians have no such ceiling and can claim credit to increase the likelihood that citizens will attribute credit to them. As a result, both political actors can receive credit for the same local goods. The article tests and supports these theoretical predictions using a vignette survey experiment in Colombia.

Keywords

Credit attributionelectoral behaviorsurvey experimentpublic goods
Type
Research Article
Information
Latin American Politics and Society , Volume 65 , Issue 4 , November 2023 , pp. 99 - 129
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the University of Miami

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Footnotes

Conflict of interest: The author declares no conflict of interest.

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