Is all Politics Local? Credit Claiming and the Quest for Reelection
Abstract:
Former Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill is famous for his often-repeated claim that “all politics is local.” O’Neill believed that taking care of the concerns of one’s district ensured electoral success. David Mayhew includes credit claiming—providing particularized benefits to the district, pejoratively referred to as “pork”—among the tried and true strategies incumbents use to ensure their reelection. Using the press releases of Representative Bizz Johnson (D-CA) this research examines patterns of credit-claiming activity over his twenty-year career. In particular, we examine the hypothesis that credit claiming increases during election years as Johnson sought to ensure his reelection to Congress.
Recently I attended the 2015 Southern California Conference for Undergraduate Research.
It is a conference that focuses on up and coming student researchers from universities and college all over southern California, to present their work and gain vital presentation experience.
My coauthor and I presented on the topic of representation, and how it can be calculated through the use of credit claims, for example from congressional member Bizz Johnson’s office. Our theory was that the idea of political representation can be calculated through the amount of credit claims a congressional member makes within their press releases. We value these credit claims as money or benefits for a district that the congressional member insinuates they were the ones to bring in governmental money to support the district they represent. We at first hypothesized that the amount of credit claims had a significant relationship with mid-term congressional election years, as the government was under more public scrutiny during these elections. What we found was that was untrue and there was no statistically significant relationship between congressional election years and the amount of credit claims. From our results we knew there as something going on, so we ran another test. What we do notice is, that there is a statistically significant correlation with presidential election years and credit claims.
