A growing body of research shows that parliamentary activities affect legislators’ electoral performance with hard-working incumbents receiving extra votes and being more likely to get re-elected (Bouteca et al. 2019; Papp and Russo 2018). Different types of activities and mechanisms have the potential to boost MPs’ reelection chances, including their perceived competence (Kulisheck and Mondak 1996), constituency-oriented activities (Chiru 2018), issue representation (Papp 2020), the initiation of legislation (Bowler 2010; Daubler et al. 2016), or particular representative styles (Martin 2010). However, the causal mechanisms linking the incumbents’ record to their electoral performance remain poorly understood (François and Navarro 2020). In particular, it is not clear whether voters care more for what their representatives actually do or for what they stand for. In other words, do voters reward the incumbents’ deeds rather than their words? Besides, do they simply care for the substance of the MPs’ activities or do they also value the MPs’ sheer effort? To answer these questions and disentangle the various mechanisms at play, I rely on a lab-experiment in which the participants are asked to assess the performance of fictive MPs based on varying presentations of their personal parliamentary record.