Distributive spending and presidential partisan politics
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Distributive spending and presidential partisan politics Yaniv Reingewertz1 · Thushyanthan Baskaran2 Received: 27 March 2019 / Accepted: 14 October 2019 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019
Abstract Do Republican and Democratic presidents vary in their geographic allocations of federal spending? Recent scholarship suggests that US presidents provide more federal outlays to districts represented by their co-partisans, but leave the issue of partisan affiliation unanswered. We explore that question using an updated database that covers federal spending programs over the 1984–2014 period. We show that the alignment effect found in previous studies cannot be observed for Republican presidents. We argue that Republican presidents may not use pork as much as Democratic presidents because their core constituency is fiscally conservative. One implication of the results reported herein is that the electoral benefits of distributive politics depend on the fiscal preferences of the electorate. Keywords Distributive spending · President · Congress · Partisan alignment · Democrats · Republicans JEL Classification: H10 · H40 · H50
1 Introduction One of the key activities of government is to distribute public spending across geographical and political units. While budget allocations in the United States ultimately are made by Congress, the executive branch drafts the initial budget proposal and implements the final budget once it has been approved. Through his influence during the proposal and implementation phases, the president can steer federal spending according to his own or his party’s preferences. In an important contribution, Berry et al. (2010) examine how the partisan affiliations of congressional districts and alignments with the president affect the distribution of federal outlays using data for 1984 through 2007. They show that congressional districts whose representatives belong to the president’s party receive more federal outlays. Kriner and Reeves (2015b) extend Berry et al. (2010) analysis, but devote more attention to the specific characteristics of states. They show that besides the alignment bias observed * Yaniv Reingewertz [email protected] 1
Department of Public Administration and Policy, School of Political Sciences, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel
2
Department of Economics, University of Siegen, Siegen, Germany
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Vol.:(0123456789)
Public Choice
by Berry et al., presidents also target counties in both swing and core states. Dynes and Huber (2015) find that alignment with voters is more important than alignment with representatives in presidential allocation behavior. Likewise, Larcinese et al. (2006) find that states voting heavily for the incumbent in the last presidential election tend to receive more federal funds. Berry and Gersen (2017) disaggregate federal spending according to federal agencies. They show that high-level personnel politicization (packing) of federal agencies interacts with political alignment for determining the geograph
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