We examine whether voters are more likely to vote to re-elect an incumbent government if they are satisfied with the government’s spending levels in two key areas of social programs: healthcare and education. We also seek to understand if voters are better able to translate that satisfaction (or lack thereof) into rewarding (or punishing) the government in the subsequent election if the government is composed of a single political party and operates under a constituency-based system. The thermostatic model and the literature on clarity of responsibility suggest that voters will reward governments when they spend exactly the right amount of money on social programs and are better able to do so if a single-party constituency-based government is in office. Using data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems dataset, collected between 2011 and 2016, we test these two hypotheses. In line with our theoretical expectations, we find that voters are in fact most likely to reward governments that spend exactly the right amount of money on social programs like healthcare and education, and that clarity of responsibility means that they are best able to do so when a single-party constituency-based government is in office. Our findings have important implications: governments should be prudent in dedicating government funding to social programs. Single-party governments, in constituency based systems in particular, are most likely to be rewarded when voters think they are spending the right amount of money on social programs and can lose support if they spend too much or too little.