Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-24hb2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-28T16:03:15.984Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Testing Models of Distributive Politics using Exit Polls to Measure Voters’ Preferences and Partisanship

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 November 2012

Abstract

This article tests several hypotheses about distributive politics by studying the distribution of federal spending across US states over the period 1978–2002. It improves on previous work by using survey data to measure the share of voters in each state that are Democrats, Republicans and Independents, or liberals, conservatives and moderates. No evidence is found that the allocation of federal spending to the states is distorted by strategic manipulation to win electoral support. States with many swing voters are not advantaged compared to states with more loyal voters, and ‘battleground states’ are not advantaged compared to other states. Spending appears to have little or no effect on voters’ choices, while partisanship and ideology have large effects.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

Department of Government and STICERD, London School of Economics and Political Science (email: V.Larcinese@lse.ac.uk); Department of Government, Harvard University, and NBER; and Department of Economics, Royal Holloway University of London, Erasmus University (Rotterdam) and Tinbergen Institute, respectively. We thank participants of seminars at LSE, Harvard, MIT, Columbia, Cambridge, Oxford, Bocconi, Warwick, Ferrara and Pavia. We are grateful to James Alt, Ciro Biderman, John Patty, Albert Sole’ Olle and Vera Troeger for useful comments and suggestions and to Indraneel Sircar for dedicated research assistance. The usual caveat applies. James Snyder gratefully acknowledges the financial support of National Science Foundation Grant SES-0079035. Data and replication material is available at the Dataverse Archive: http://dvn.iq.harvard.edu/dvn/. An online appendix containing additional information is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0007123412000245.

References

1 Most previous studies acknowledge this problem and tend to use lagged values of the vote to mitigate the problem somewhat, but this method is, at best, a partial solution, as we will discuss later.

2 To our knowledge, only one previous study (Matz Dahlberg and Eva Johansson, ‘On the Vote Purchasing Behavior of Incumbent Governments’, American Political Science Review, 96 (2002), 27–40) uses survey data for a similar purpose. They use the Swedish Election Study to construct a measure of the percentage of swing voters in Swedish regions and then analyse a specific spending program of ecological grants.

3 Campbell, Angus, Miller, WarrenConverse, Philip and Stokes, Donald, The American Voter (New York: Wiley, 1960)Google Scholar

4 Green, DonaldPalmquist, Bradley and Schickler, Eric, Partisan Hearts and Minds (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002)Google Scholar

5 Goren, Paul, ‘Party Identification and Core Political Values’, American Journal of Political Science, 49 (2005), 881–96 CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 Ansolabehere, StephenRodden, Jonathan and Jr.Snyder, James M., ‘The Strength of Issues: Using Multiple Measures to Gauge Preference Stability, Ideological Constraint, and Issue Voting’, American Political Science Review, 102 (2008), 215–32 CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 See Campbell, Miller, Converse and Stokes, The American Voter.

8 Campbell, James E., ‘Sources of the New Deal Realignment: The Contributions of Conversion and Mobilization to Partisan Change’, Western Political Quarterly, 8 (1985), 357–76 Google Scholar

Carmines, Edward G.McIver, John P and Stimson, James A., ‘Unrealized Partisanship: A Theory of Dealignment’, Journal of Politics, 49 (1987), 376–400 CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 Fiorina, Morris P., Retrospective Voting in American Elections (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981)Google Scholar

MacKuen, Michael B.Erikson, Robert S. and Stimson, James A., ‘Macropartisanship’, American Political Science Review, 83 (1989), 1125–42 CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 Abramowitz, Alan I. and Saunders, Kyle L., ‘Ideological Realignment in the U.S. Electorate’, The Journal of Politics, 60 (1998), 634–52 CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 Valentino, Nicholas A. and Sears, David O., ‘Old Times There Are Not Forgotten: Race and Partisan Realignment in the Contemporary South’, American Journal of Political Science, 49 (2005), 672–88 CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12 This is even true for the most ‘economic’ factor noted above – party identification as a running tally of past economic performance – since the tally is thought to be mainly about national economic performance rather than voters’ individual circumstances.

13 The Center for Responsive Politics, http:www.opensecret.org.

14 Converse, Philip E., ‘The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics’, in D.E. Apter, ed., Ideology and Discontent (New York: Free Press, 1964)Google Scholar

15 Page, Benjamin I. and Shapiro, Robert Y., The Rational Public: Fifty Years of Trends in Americans’ Policy Preferences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Stimson, James A., Public Opinion in America: Moods, Cycles, and Swings (Boulder CO: Westview Press, 1998)Google Scholar

16 Lindbeck, Assar and Weibull, Jorgen W., ‘Balanced-Budget Redistribution as the Outcome of Political Competition’, Public Choice, 52 (1987), 273–97 CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17 Dixit, Avinash and Londregan, John, ‘Redistributive Politics and Economic Efficiency’, American Political Science Review, 89 (1995), 856–66 CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Dixit, Avinash and Londregan, John, ‘The Determinants of Success of Special Interests in Redistributive Politics’, Journal of Politics, 58 (1996) 1132–55Google Scholar

18 Stromberg, David, ‘Radio's Impact on Public Spending’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 119 (2004), 189–221 CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19 Lizzeri, Alessandro and Persico, Nicola, ‘The Provision of Public Goods under Alternative Electoral Incentives’, American Economic Review, 91 (2001), 225–39 CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Persson, Torsten and Tabellini, Guido, ‘Constitutional Rules and Fiscal Policy Outcomes’, American Economic Review, 94 (2004), 25–46 CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20 Snyder, James M. Jr., ‘Election Goals and the Allocation of Campaign Resources,’ Econometrica, 57 (1989), 637–60 CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Stromberg, David, ‘How the Electoral College Influences Campaigns and Policy: The Probability of Being Florida’, American Economic Review, 98 (2008), 769–807 CrossRefGoogle Scholar

21 Kramer, Gerald H., ‘A Decision-Theoretic Analysis of a Problem in Political Campaigning’, in Joseph L. Bernd, ed., Mathematical Applications in Political Science, Vol. 11 (Dallas, TX: Southern Methodist University, 1964)Google Scholar

Cox, Gary W. and McCubbins, Matthew D., ‘Electoral Politics as a Redistributive Game’, Journal of Politics, 48 (1986), 370–89 CrossRefGoogle Scholar

22 Osborne, Martin J. and Slivinski, Al, ‘A Model of Political Competition with Citizen-Candidates’ Quarterly Journal of Economics, 111 (1996), 65–96 CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Besley, Timothy and Coate, Steven, ‘An Economic Model of Representative Democracy’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 108 (1997), 85–114 Google Scholar

23 Baron, David P. and Ferejohn, John, ‘Bargaining in Legislatures’, American Political Science Review, 83 (1989), 1181–1206 CrossRefGoogle Scholar

24 McKelvey, Richard D. and Riezman, Raymond, ‘Seniority in Legislatures’, American Political Science Review, 86 (1992), 951–65 CrossRefGoogle Scholar

25 Ansolabehere, Stephen, Snyder, James M. Jr. and Ting, Michael M., ‘Bargaining in Bicameral Legislatures: When and Why Does Malapportionment Matter?’ American Political Science Review, 97 (2003), 471–81 CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Knight, Brian G., ‘Estimating the Value of Proposal Power’, American Economic Review, 95 (2005), 1639–52 CrossRefGoogle Scholar

26 Weingast, Barry R.Shepsle, Kenneth A. and Johnsen, Christopher, ‘The Political Economy of Benefits and Costs: A Neoclassical Approach to Distributive Politics’, Journal of Political Economy, 89 (1981), 642–64 CrossRefGoogle Scholar

McCarty, Nolan M., ‘Presidential Pork, Executive Veto Power and Distributive Politics’, American Political Science Review, 94 (2000), 117–29 CrossRefGoogle Scholar

27 Wright, Gavin, ‘The Political Economy of New Deal Spending: An Econometric Analysis’, Review of Economics and Statistics, 56 (1974), 30–8 CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Wallis, John J., ‘Employment, Politics and Economic Recovery during the Great Depression’, Review of Economics and Statistics, 69 (1987), 516–20 CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Wallis, John J., ‘What Determines the Allocation of National Government Grants to the States?’ NBER Historical Paper No. 90 (1996); Robert K. Fleck, ‘Electoral Incentives, Public Policy, and the New Deal Realignment’, Southern Economic Journal, 65 (1999), 377–404 Google Scholar

Fishback, Price V.Kantor, Shawn and Wallis, John J., ‘Can the New Deal Three-R's be Rehabilitated? A County-by-County, Program-by-Program Analysis’, Explorations in Economic History, 40 (2003), 278–307 CrossRefGoogle Scholar

28 David Stromberg, ‘Radio's Impact on Public Spending’.

29 Larcinese, ValentinoRizzo, Leonzio and Testa, Cecilia, ‘Allocating the US Federal Budget to the States: the Impact of the President’, Journal of Politics, 68 (2006), 447–56 CrossRefGoogle Scholar

30 Wright, ‘The Political Economy of New Deal Spending’.

31 Larcinese, Rizzo and Testa, ‘Allocating the US Federal Budget to the States’.

32 Colantoni, Claude S.Levesque, Terrence J. and Ordeshook, Peter C., ‘Campaign Resource Allocation Under the Electoral College’, American Political Science Review, 69 (1975), 41–161 CrossRefGoogle Scholar

33 Browning, Clyde E.Outlays’, ‘The Geography of Federal, Studies in Geography No. 4 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Department of Geography, 1973)Google Scholar

Ritt, Leonard G., ‘Committee Position, Seniority, and the Distribution of Government Expenditures’, Public Policy, 24 (1976), 469–97 Google Scholar

Owens, John R. and Wade, Larry L., ‘Federal Spending in Congressional Districts’, Western Political Quarterly, 37 (1984), 404–23 CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Levitt, Stephen D. and Snyder, James M. Jr., ‘Political Parties and the Distribution of Federal Outlays’, American Journal of Political Science, 39 (1995), 958–80 CrossRefGoogle Scholar

34 Levitt, Steven D. and Poterba, James M., ‘Congressional Distributive Politics and State Economic Performance’, Public Choice, 99 (1999), 185–216 CrossRefGoogle Scholar

35 Garrett, Thomas A. and Sobel, Russel S., ‘The Political Economy of FEMA Disaster Payments,’Economic Inquiry, 46 (2003), 496–509CrossRefGoogle Scholar

36 Ansolabehere, Stephen and Snyder, James M. Jr., ‘Party Control of State Government and the Distribution of Public Expenditures’, Scandinavian Journal of Economics, 108 (2006), 547–69 CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Holden, Matthew, White Man’s Burden (New York: Chandler, 1973)Google Scholar

Rakove, Milton, Don’t Make No Waves, Don’t Back No Losers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975)Google Scholar

Erie, Stephen P., ‘Politics, the Public Sector, and Irish Social Mobility: San Francisco, 1870–1900’,Western Political Quarterly, 31 (1978), 274–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Johnston, Michael, ‘Patrons and Clients, Jobs and Machines: A Case Study of the Uses of Patronage’, American Political Science Review, 73 (1979), 385–98 CrossRefGoogle Scholar

37 Arulampalam, Dasgupta, Dhillon and Dutta, ‘Electoral Goals and Centre-State Transfers’.

38 Dahlberg and Johansson, ‘On the Vote Purchasing Behavior of Incumbent Governments’.

39 Eric Crampton, ‘Distributive Politics in a Strong Party System: Evidence from Canadian Job Grant Programs’, Discussion Paper (2004), University of Canterbury.

40 Kevin Milligan and Michael Smart, ‘Regional Grants as Pork Barrel Politics’, Unpublished manuscript, University of Toronto, 2005.

41 Ward, Hugh and John, Peter, ‘Targeting Benefits for Electoral Gain: Constituency Marginality and the Distribution of Grants to English Local Authorities’, Political Studies, 47 (1999), 32–52 CrossRefGoogle Scholar

42 Case, Anne, ‘Election Goals and Income Redistribution: Recent Evidence from Albania’, European Economic Review, 45 (2001), 405–23 CrossRefGoogle Scholar

43 Denemark, David, ‘Partisan Pork Barrel in Parliamentary Systems: Australian Constituency-Level Grants’, Journal of Politics, 62 (2000), 896–915 CrossRefGoogle Scholar

44 Other studies find evidence that is more consistent with the loyal voters hypothesis. See Albert Sole'-Olle' and Pilar Sorribas-Navarro, ‘The Effects of Partisan Alignment on the Allocation of Intergovernmental Transfers: Differences-in-Differences Estimates for Spain’, Journal of Public Economics, 92 (2008), 2302–19.

45 For example, officially measured unemployment figures do not count discouraged workers who are outside the working force; official immigration figures do not include undocumented aliens.

46 Researchers, including ourselves, are often less than fully satisfied with the results from simulation exercises when they do not provide a clear intuition. This is not a weakness of simulations per se, but a ‘weakness’ of complicated models.

47 Lindbeck and Weibull, ‘Balanced-Budget Redistribution as the Outcome of Political Competition’.

48 Dixit, Avinash and Londregan, John, ‘Redistributive Politics and Economic Efficiency’, American Political Science Review, 89 (1995), 856–66 CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Dixit, Avinash and Londregan, John, ‘The Determinants of Success of Special Interests in Redistributive Politics’, Journal of Politics, 58 (1996) 1132–55Google Scholar

49 Dixit and Londregan, ‘The Determinants of Success of Special Interests in Redistributive Politics’; Cox and McCubbins, ‘Electoral Politics as a Redistributive Game’.

50 Milligan and Smart, ‘Regional Grants as Pork Barrel Politics’.

51 Colantoni, Levesque and Ordeshook, ‘Campaign Resource Allocation Under the Electoral College’.

52 Stromberg, ‘How the Electoral College Influences Campaigns and Policy’.

53 This formulation does not do justice to some of these models, such as Stromberg, ‘How the Electoral College Influences Campaigns and Policy’, which takes into account the total probability that a state is ‘pivotal’ in the electoral college.

54 Wright, ‘The Political Economy of New Deal Spending’.

55 Trending partisanship could also produce a large standard deviation of ${{\tilde{V}}^D} $, which is a potential problem.

56 Dahlberg and Johansson, ‘On the Vote Purchasing Behavior of Incumbent Governments’.

57 Rather than reporting all possible specifications, we focus on ${{{\mathop{\hat\alpha }\limits^{}} }_I} $ and ${{{\mathop{\hat\alpha }\limits^{}} }_C} $ in Cases 1 and 2, and on ${{{\mathop{\hat\alpha }\limits^{}} }_P} $ in Cases 3 and 4. However, we always report the results for the case in which all variables are included. We also ran simulations that incorporate measurement error into the ‘direct’ measure of voters’ partisanship – that is, in the share of independent variable Ij. In these simulations the estimated coefficient on the term measured with error $ ({{\hat{a}}_I}) $ is biased toward zero. This is the usual attenuation bias associated with regressors that are measured with error. The other coefficients are almost unaffected, however. Results of these simulations are in Appendix Table A.1, which can be found in the Supplementary Material of this paper, at http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0007123412000245

58 Interest on the debt is not included in any of the dependent variables.

59 Voter News Service is an association of ABC News, CNN, CBS News, FOX News, NBC News and the Associated Press.

60 In addition, voters are asked a series of questions about their demographic and socio-economic characteristics, questions about the reasons for their vote choice, and, sometimes, questions about salient policy issues.

61 One possible alternative, at least for partisanship, is to use party registration data. However, this would sharply reduce the sample of states (probably in a non-random way), since only twenty-nine states have party registration.

62 Erikson, Robert S.Wright, Gerald C. and McIver, John P., Statehouse Democracy: Public Opinion and Policy in the American States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)Google Scholar

63 This is consistent with Green, Palmquist and Schickler, Partisan Hearts and Minds.

64 This is consistent with the findings of Green, Palmquist and Schickler, Partisan Hearts and Minds and Goren, ‘Party Identification and Core Political Values’.

65 Zaller, John and Feldman, Stanley, ‘A Simple Theory of the Survey Response: Answering Questions versus Revealing Preferences’, American Journal of Political Science, 36 (1992), 579–616 CrossRefGoogle Scholar

66 Mullainathan, Sendhil and Washington, Ebony, ‘Sticking with Your Vote: Cognitive Dissonance and Political Attitudes’, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 1 (2009), 86–111 Google Scholar

67 Of course, not all respondents have a Senate race in which to vote, and in midterm years no respondents have a presidential race in which to vote.

68 Each respondent could vote in six or seven races – two presidential races and three House races, and either one or two Senate races.

69 Results are available from the authors upon request.

70 We constructed analogous variables using the party affiliation of the majority in the house (House majority copartisans) and senate (Senate majority copartisans) as well as the political affiliation of state senators (Senator Copartisans). The results are substantively the same as those obtained in the case of presidential affiliation. We do not report them here, but they are available from the authors upon request.

71 When we use presidential term as the time unit, instead of a dummy for natural disasters, we include the share of the term that contained years in which a natural disaster occurred: possible values are therefore 0, 0.25, 0.5, 0.75 and 1. The total population size captures the effects of malapportionment of the US Senate, as small states are extremely over-represented. It may, however, also capture budgetary lags. Because of ‘incremental budgeting’, population growth is likely to negatively affect per-capita expenditure levels. If there are lags in adjusting the allocation of transfers to population shifts, then as a state's population grows its per-capita transfers will automatically fall. Economies of scale might also lead to a negative effect of population on per-capita transfers.

72 We do not include variables to measure committee positions or seniority. Previous studies have found little or no evidence that these variables are important determinants of aggregate spending in states or districts. See Owens and Wade, ‘Federal Spending in Congressional Districts’; Ritt, ‘Committee Position, Seniority, and the Distribution of Government Expenditures’; Levitt and Snyder, ‘Political Parties and the Distribution of Federal Outlays’.

73 Results are available from the authors upon request.

74 Detailed results are available in the online appendix.

75 Another concern is that federal expenditure could be spatially autocorrelated. To deal with this possibility, we have included census division dummies and division-specific trends in the specifications that do not include state fixed effects. When state fixed effects are included we only add division-specific trends. Since these modifications only marginally change our results, in the interest of space we do not include the tables in the article. Results are available in the online appendix.

76 For a within-state standard deviation (with time units given by presidential terms) of approximately 4 per cent, we get an increased federal spending of $17.20, which represents only 0.5 per cent of average per-capita federal spending ($3,100).

77 Converse, ‘The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics’; Green, Palmquist and Schickler, Partisan Hearts and Minds.

78 Page and Shapiro, The Rational Public; Stimson, Public Opinion in America.

79 Assuming that voters are rational, retrospective and prospective voting are not, in fact, mutually exclusive. Rational retrospective voters, while using information about the past, are also forward looking because they reward/punish incumbents on the basis of their past performance in order to influence their future behaviour. Similarly, rational prospective voters are to some extent retrospective because they must look at implemented policy to verify that promises are kept. See Timothy Besley, Principled Agents? The Political Economy of Good Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

80 Marco Manacorda, Edward Miguel and Andrea Vigorito, ‘Government Transfers and Political Support’, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 3 (2011), 1–28; Cristian Pop-Eleches and Grigore Pop-Eleches, ‘Government Spending and Pocketbook Voting: Quasi-Experimental Evidence from Romania’, unpublished manuscript, 2010.

81 Mikael Elinder, Henrik Jordahl and Panu Poutvaara , ‘Selfish and Prospective: Theory and Evidence of Pocketbook Voting’, IZA Discussion Papers 3763 (2008), Institute for the Study of Labor.

82 We evaluated how well self-reported individual vote choices aggregate to predict actual state-level electoral results. This is a potential problem for any survey-based analysis of voting decisions. The correlation between the results predicted by the exit poll data and the actual electoral results is over 0.79.

83 Bartels, Larry M., ‘Partisanship and Voting Behavior, 1952–1996’, American Journal of Political Science, 44 (2000), 35–50 CrossRefGoogle Scholar

84 Although the estimates reported in Table 4 assume that all voters should be affected in the same way by the receipt of federal funds, this is not necessarily the case. Hence, we have considered specifications that introduce interactions between the spending variables and the partisanship and ideological variables. The results suggest that heterogeneous responses are sometimes possible, but that overall, these effects are hardly statistically significant, particularly considering the size of the sample.

85 See, for example, Robert M. Stein and Kenneth N. Bickers, ‘Congressional Elections and the Pork Barrel’, Journal of Politics, 56 (1994), 377–99; Levitt and Snyder, ‘Political Parties and the Distribution of Federal Outlays’.

86 Some other studies in the literature also find insignificant effects of state expenditure on voting, for example Besley, Principled Agents? The Political Economy of Good Government.

87 Sundquist, James L., Dynamics of the Party System: Alignment and Realignment of Political Parties in the United States (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institute, 1983)Google Scholar

88 Budge, Ian and Hofferbert, Richard I., ‘Mandates and Policy Outputs: U.S. Party Platforms and Federal Expenditures’, American Political Science Review, 84 (1990), 111–31 CrossRefGoogle Scholar

King, Gary and Laver, Michael, ‘On Party Platforms, Mandates, and Government Spending’, American Political Science Review, 87 (1993), 744–50 CrossRefGoogle Scholar

89 Auten, GeraldBozeman, Barry and Cline, Robert, ‘A Sequential Model of Congressional Appropriations’, American Journal of Political Science, 28 (1984), 503–23 CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Browning, Robert X., ‘Presidents, Congress, and Policy Outcomes: U.S. Social Welfare Expenditures, 1949–1977’, American Journal of Political Science, 29 (1985), 197–215 CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Kiewiet, D. Roderick and McCubbins, Matthew D., ‘Congressional Appropriations and the Electoral Connection’, Journal of Politics, 47 (1985), 59–82 CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Kiewiet, D. Roderick and McCubbins, Mathew D., The Logic of Delegation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991)Google Scholar

Lowery, DavidBookheimer, Samuel and Malachowski, James, ‘Partisanship in the Appropriations Process’, American Politics Quarterly, 13 (1985), 188–99 CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Hibbs, Douglas A., The American Political Economy: Macroeconomic Politics in the United States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987)CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Alesina, AlbertoLondregan, John and Rosenthal, Howard, ‘A Model of the Political Economy of the United States’, American Political Science Review, 87 (1993), 12–33 CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Erikson, Robert S.MacKuen, Michael B. and Stimson, James A., The Macro Polity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)Google Scholar

Kamlet, Mark S. and Mowery, David C., ‘Influences on Executive and Congressional Budgetary Priorities, 1955–1981’, American Political Science Review, 81 (1987), 155–78 CrossRefGoogle Scholar

90 Erikson, Robert S. and Wright, Gerald C., ‘Voters, Candidates, and Issues in Congressional Elections’, in Lawrence C. Dodd and Bruce I. Oppenheimer, eds, Congress Reconsidered, 6th ed. (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly Press, 1997)Google Scholar

Ansolabehere, Stephen, Snyder, James M. Jr. and Stewart, Charles III, ‘Candidate Positioning in U.S. House Elections’, American Journal of Political Science, 45 (2001), 136–59 CrossRefGoogle Scholar

91 Poole, Keith T. and Rosenthal, Howard, Congress: A Political-Economic History of Roll Call Voting (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)Google Scholar

Lee, David S.Moretti, Enrico and Butler, Matthew J., ‘Do Voters Affect or Elect Policies? Evidence from the U.S. House’, American Economic Review, 119 (2004), 807–59 Google Scholar

92 Mansergh, Lucy and Thomson, Robert, ‘Election Pledges, Party Competition, and Policymaking’, Comparative Politics, 39 (2007), 311–29 Google Scholar

93 Our results do not exclude the possibility that strategic distribution of funds might occur in particular years (such as pre-election years) when electoral concerns might be stronger. The hypothesis of a ‘political cycle’ in distributive politics is not considered by the large existing literature that we have revisited in our work, but it represents a very interesting avenue for future theoretical and empirical research on pork barrel spending.

Supplementary material: PDF

Larcinese Supplementary Material

Appendix

Download Larcinese Supplementary Material(PDF)
PDF 162.5 KB