Which Politicians Respond?

Chapter 9 expands on analyses of the field experiment to explore additional variation in the characteristics of politicians’ responsiveness. First, it investigates the degree to which politicians’ responses reflect state- and individual-level characteristics that may be associated with incentives to cultivate a personal vote. These analyses highlight, in particular, that—consistent with the theoretical discussion in Chapter 4 and existing work on the personal vote—electoral politics play a key role in affecting the degree to which politicians attempt to build their individual reputations via provision of assistance to individual constituents. Chapters 8 and 9 therefore collectively explore the conditions under which constituency service does and does not occur.