Credit claiming and mayoral preferences for project uptake amid a migrant crisis

Abstract

When considering taking over public projects, executives assess their perceived credit-claiming opportunities against potential blame attribution. The balance of these perceptions may shift under crisis. Meanwhile, the literature has mostly explored project uptake in delegation contexts when decisionmakers hold certain control powers over delegees, but not when such controls are absent. Amid one of the largest migrant crises worldwide, we conducted a survey experiment with 238 sitting Colombian mayors. We explore issue visibility, salience of project beneficiaries, and policy stage (formulation versus implementation) as drivers of mayors' preferences for project uptake or cession to upper-level governments. Results reveal mayors are less likely to cede implementation to the national government when presented with a more visible project. Neither visibility nor beneficiaries' salience affects mayoral preferences for project formulation on its own. However, mayors are less likely to delegate both formulation and implementation when beneficiaries are more salient to their constituents.