districting and government overspending theories of government spending driven by a common pool problem in the fiscal revenues pool predict that greater districting of a political jurisdiction raises the scale of government this paper presents evidence on this and related predictions from a cross section of city governments in the united states the main finding is that when other plausible determinants of government spending are controlled for greater districting leads to a considerably greater scale of government activity the results also show that at large electoral systems do not and forms of government that concentrate powers in the office of the executive do break this relationship

the birth of pork local appropriations in america s first century after describing a newly assembled dataset consisting of almost 9 000 local appropriations made by the u s congress between 1789 and 1882 we test competing accounts of the politics surrounding them before offering a more nuanced historically contingent view of the emergence of the pork barrel we demonstrate that for most of this historical period despite contemporary accusations of crass electoral motives the pattern of appropriations is largely inconsistent with accounts of distributive politics grounded in a logic of legislative credit claiming instead support for appropriations in the house mapped cleanly onto the partisan ideological structure of congress for most of this period and only in the 1870s produced the universalistic coalitions commonly associated with pork barrel spending we trace this shift to two historical factors the emergence of a solid democratic south and growth in the fraction of appropriations funding recurrent expenditures on extant projects rather than new starts

why democracies produce efficient results by applying the standard tools of microeconomic analysis i argue that democratic markets work as well as economic markets in particular i show that previous work has greatly exaggerated the existence of principal agent and informational problems in electoral markets and has drawn incorrect conclusions

the effect of legislature size on public spending evidence from a regression discontinuity design what is the effect of legislature size on public spending an answer to this question is provided by weingast et al j polit econ 89 4 642 664 1981 whose law of 1 n posits that an increase in the number of elected representatives always leads to an increase in public spending because elected politicians regard the tax base as a common pool from which they can finance specific projects for their constituencies and these specific constituencies internalize the full benefits of the projects but only bear a fraction of the costs projects are financed from the common tax base fiscal inefficiency will increase with the number of representatives in this paper i test the validity of the law of 1 n using a dataset of 9325 german municipalities between 2008 and 2010 through the application of a regression discontinuity design many of the methodological pitfalls of previous studies can be avoided and a valid estimation of the causal effect of legislature size on public spending for german municipalities can be determined the results do not corroborate the positive findings of previous studies which generally supported the implications of the law of 1 n for the years 2008 2010 i find a negative effect of legislature size on public spending in german municipal councils

a bargaining theory of inefficient redistribution policies when two policies are available to achieve the same goal why is the relatively inefficient one often observed we address this question in the context of policies used to redistribute income towards special interest groups sigs in a two stage model in the first stage the set of constraints on policy instruments is chosen in the second stage the government and sigs bargain over the level of the available transfer policies restrictions on the use of efficient policies and the use of inefficient ones reduce the surplus over which sigs and governments can bargain there is however an offsetting effect not generally recognized in models of inefficient redistribution an improvement in the government s bargaining position which allows it to capture a larger share of the surplus we show that this positive effect for the government dominates under plausible conditions inefficient policies are the equilibrium outcome under alternative first stage mechanisms for policy selection such as the election of policymakers or in some cases bargaining between sigs and the government jel classification d7 f13 c70 h23

on the incentives to establish and play political rent seeking games legislators will enact programs that encourage rent seeking only if they can thereby increase their chances of winning election or of receiving contributions themselves the paper shows rent seeking to be electorally robust both voters and contributors will often avoid a candidate who proposes to eliminate rent seeking important exceptions arise however if contributions are more likely to help challengers than incumbents and if legislators prefer that some firm rather than another receive governmental contracts

a carrot and stick approach to agenda setting this paper models a legislature in which the same agenda setter serves for two periods showing how he can exploit a legislature completely in the first period by promising future benefits to legislators who support him in equilibrium a large majority of legislators vote for the first period proposal because they thereby maintain the chance of belonging to the minimum winning coalition in the future legislators may therefore approve policies by large majorities or even unanimously that benefit few or even none of them the results are robust but institutional arrangements such as entitlements can reduce the agenda setter s power by reducing his discretion to reward and punish legislators and rules such as sequential voting can increase a legislator s ability to resist exploitation

policy choice theory and evidence from commitment via international trade agreements abstract why do governments employ inefficient policies when more efficient ones are available for the same purpose we address this puzzle in the context of redistribution toward special interest groups sigs by focusing on a set of important policies tariffs and non tariff barriers ntbs in our policy choice model a government can gain by committing to constrain tariffs through international agreements even if this leads to the use of less efficient ntbs commitment has political value because it improves the bargaining position of a government that is weak relative to domestic sigs using detailed data we find support for several of the model s predictions including i tariff commitments in trade agreements increase the likelihood and restrictiveness of ntbs but not enough to offset the original tariff reductions ii tariff commitments are more likely to be adopted and more stringent when the government is weaker relative to a sig thus the results can explain the use of inefficient policies for redistribution and suggest that the bargaining motive is an important source of the political value of commitment in international agreements

how to succeed at increasing spending without really trying the balanced budget amendment and the item veto congressional efforts at budgetary reform generally contain procedural impediments designed to limit profligate spending in particular the line item veto and the balanced budget amendment are intended to limit the ability of legislators to pursue their constituents interests through pork barrel politics at the expense of the broader public interest however assuming that legislators remain motivated by local constituent interests we argue that these reforms will promote unexpected results the supermajorities requires by the line item veto and the balanced budget amendment include incentives for log rolling that promote and may indeed increase pork barrel spending

why so much stability majority voting legislative institutions and gordon tullock gordon tullock nearly a half century ago raised questions about arrow s theorem a phantom has stalked the classrooms and seminars of economics and political science he followed this up by asking in light of arrow s theorem why so much stability in this paper a more nuanced understanding of the operating characteristics of majority rule in institutional settings anticipated and stimulated by tullock is spelled out a major distinction is made between preference cycles and voting cycles suggesting why arrow s phantom still stalks but that tullock s intuitions are germane as well

the law of 1 n revisited distributive politics legislature size and the costs of collective action the foundational model of distributive politics predicts a positive relationship between the number of legislative districts and the level of inefficiency of projects approved by the legislature weingast shepsle and johnsen s law of 1 n this relationship has been tested extensively in the empirical literature with mixed results this article presents a model wherein passing the omnibus legislation typical of distributive politics is a costly process the model predicts a nonlinear relationship between legislature size and spending as increasing the size of the legislature also increases the costs of collective action results from an empirical exercise based on u s state legislatures 1962 2014 are consistent with the proposed model showing a 1 n effect which diminishes at the margin as the legislature s size increases especially in the lower chamber

a problem with euclidean preferences in spatial models of politics abstract euclidean public sector preferences can not be induced from a strictly quasiconcave primitive utility function and a linear constraint

is local beautiful fiscal decentralization in mexico summary in this study we present evidence from mexico regarding the weak effectiveness of federal transfers and low absorption capacity of sub national governments in poor areas when political opportunistic behavior is present we show that the distribution of conditional transfers is discretionary due to a monitoring problem and deficiency in institutional frameworks this may be the cause for opportunistic behavior by political elites the results suggest that more funds are distributed to areas with more voters in addition localities with a higher number of swing voters also receive more resources these results show that the poorest populations receive the least amount of money from the community based development funds

political accountability and sequential policymaking abstract we develop a model of political accountability with sequential policymaking when a bureaucrat s actions are transparent his overseer faces a political time inconsistency problem she is tempted to revise her retention rule in the middle of the policymaking process as a result the bureaucrat s equilibrium behavior overemphasizes later tasks if the overseer knows the technology by which policies translate into outcomes then she can eliminate these distortions using task specific budget caps however if the overseer is uncertain about this technology such budget caps introduce ex post inefficiency when uncertainty is sufficiently large and consequential the overseer prefers an institutional environment with a fungible budget and no transparency such an environment allows the overseer to exploit the bureaucrat s expertise though at the cost of weaker overall incentives

building majority coalitions for sub majority benefit distributions this paper poses a deceptively simple question it asks how can a program or group of programs that provides distributive benefits to recipients in a minority of legislative districts be passed by a majority of a legislative body the answer in the existing body of work on distributive policymaking would suggest that supporters of narrowly focused programs are able to ensure passage of their pet projects by logrolling with other legislators we argue that logrolling is not always necessary to produce majority support for narrowly focused programs the paper considers three institutional mechanisms for building majority support for sub majority benefit distributions political parties interest groups and administrative agencies the conditions that would be required for each mechanism to be employed are outlined descriptive data from the 100th congress are employed to reflect on the relative plausibility of each of the mechanisms with respect to the question of how a program that provides distributive benefits to recipients in a minority of legislative districts can be passed by a majority of a legislative body we reject the first mechanism the party based explanation on the grounds that it is empirically implausible at least in the american case the other two we argue are empirically plausible under certain conditions

the law of k n the effect of chamber size on government spending in bicameral legislatures recent work in political economics has examined the positive relationship between legislative size and spending which weingast et al 1981 formalized as the law of 1 n however empirical tests of this theory have produced a pattern of divergent findings the positive relationship between seats and spending appears to hold consistently for unicameral legislatures and for upper chambers in bicameral legislatures but not for lower chambers we bridge this gap between theory and empirics by extending weingast et al s model to account for bicameralism in the context of a baron ferejohn bargaining game our comparative statics predict and empirical data from u s state legislatures corroborate that the size of the upper chamber n is a positive predictor of expenditure whereas the ratio of lower to upper chamber seats k exhibits a negative effect we refer to these relationships as the law of k n as the two variables influence spending in opposite directions

the political economy of the tariff cycle how can protectionism and free trade succeed one another our answer focuses on the changing balance of private actors political demands these actors acquire interests in tariff policies because their assets are spatially concentrated and trade in these assets is subject to various limitations actors in regions experiencing no new investment in an established industry old regions have interests that sometimes differ from those in regions where there is new investment we show that old regions have no reason to be involved in tariff politics at business cycle peaks during troughs whether a state becomes more or less protectionist depends ceteris paribus on the relative political strength of old import competing and old exporting interests if old import competing industries outweigh the old exporters then protection will tend to increase at the trough and decrease at the peak of a business cycle the opposite result occurs when old exporters are more influential

political preferences for the pork barrel a generalization this paper provides a rational explanation for the observation of oversized coalitions often approaching unanimous size in the realm of distributive policies distributive policies are those which concentrate benefits in specific geographic areas states congressional districts while spreading costs through general taxation the explanation offered here that legislators may rationally prefer universalism to hard ball coalition politics generalizes earlier work of weingast and fiorina in particular it extends their results to pork barrel politics i e projects that are economically inefficient and demonstrates how packages of economically inefficient projects can nevertheless be politically popular the main theoretical feature that induces preferences for universalism is uncertainty over the composition of winning coalitions and consequently the desire for the political insurance that universalism provides

distributive politics and the allocation of federal grants understanding the dynamics of policy distribution requires an appreciation of federal grant programs that have achieved a prominent place in nearly all areas of domestic policy the theoretical literature on distributive politics however focuses almost exclusively on a centralized top down view of policy distribution by examining the role of presidents legislators and bureaucrats scholars have ignored participants who have become key actors in the distribution of federal expenditures the recipient jurisdictions this analysis of the allocation patterns under six federal programs shows that local governments exert important influences on the distribution of federal grants and that the distributional patterns and their determinants vary over time the analysis also points out the importance of disaggregation by focusing on programs and recipient jurisdictions as opposed to total federal expenditures and regions states or congressional districts

the political economy of nontariff barriers a cross national analysis nontariff barriers to trade are most pervasive when deteriorating macroeconomic conditions give rise to demands for protection by pressure groups when countries are sufficiently large to give policymakers incentives to impose protection and when domestic institutions enhance the ability of public officials to act on these incentives statistical results based on a sample of advanced industrial countries during the 1980s support the argument that the incidence of nontariff barriers tends to be greatest when the preferences of pressure groups and policymakers converge more attention should be devoted to the interaction between societal and statist factors in cross national studies of trade policy

the politics and economics of pork barrel spending the case of federal financing of water resources development this paper empirically investigates the economic and political factors that have influenced annual corps of engineers water resource spending despite the common view that pork barrel spending is economically unjustified and purely politically motivated economic factors have been important in determining water resource spending from 1865 1920 economic development and industrialization increase spending and from 1921 1988 spending appears to be counter cyclical there is also evidence that majority parties control spending levels in the post civil war period while in recent times legislators act under a norm of constrained universalism and are influenced by the costs to their constituents of increased spending

presidential particularism and divide the dollar politics when inuencing the allocation of federal dollars across the country do presidents strictly pursue maximally ecient outcomes or do they systematically target dollars to politically inuential constituencies in a county level analysis of federal spending from 1984 to 2008 we nd that presidents are not universalistic but particularistic that is they reliably direct dollars to specic constituents to further their political goals as others have noted presidents target districts represented by their co partisans in congress in the pursuit of inuence visavis the legislature but we show that at much higher levels presidents target both counties within swing states and counties in core states that strongly supported the president in recent elections swing state particularism is especially salient during presidential reelection years and core partisan counties within swing states are most heavily rewarded rather than strictly pursuing visions of good public policy or pandering to the national median voter our results suggest that presidents systematically prioritize the needs of politically important constituents

the new economics of organization over the last ten years or so an important new approach to the study of organizations has emerged within economics it is perhaps best characterized by three elements a contractual perspective on organizational relationships a theoretical focus on hierarchical control and formal analysis via principal agent models this paper provides political scientists with an overview of the new economics of organization and explores its implications for the study of public bureaucracy so far positive political theory has not contributed much to our understanding of public bureaucracy in part this is due to the unsympathetic treatment that rational modeling and most other modes of quantitative analysis have long received from students of public administration the other side of the coin however is that positive theorists have not made much of an effort to develop theories of bureaucracy their concerns have centered around two basic mechanisms of social choice voting and markets and they have devoted little systematic attention to a third mechanism that is clearly important for understanding how societies and other aggregates make collective decisions this third and relatively unexplored mechanism is hierarchy movement toward a positive theory of hierarchies would fill a serious gap in the social choice literature while at the same time making a theoretical contribution that strikes to the essence of public bureaucracy indeed of all organizations in fact significant steps toward a positive theory of hierarchies have very recently been taken but by economists not political scientists in small numbers of course economists made contributions to the study of public bureaucracy some time ago with the pioneering works of downs 1967 tullock 1965 and niskanen 1971 but this new wave of theoretical work is different it is already a large complex body of literature that is the focus of innovation and excitement among a growing number of economists and it reflects an unusual degree of theoretical coherence and cumulative effort work in this tradition tends to receive orientation from a distinctive economic approach to the analysis of organizations an approach perhaps best characterized by three elements a contractual perspective on organizational relationships a focus on hierarchical control and formal analysis via principal agent models this approach has emerged from recent attempts to move beyond the neoclassical theory of the firm which assumes away all organizational considerations to a theory of economic organizations that can explain why firms corporations and other enterprises behave as they do propo

bureaucrats legislators and the size of government some recent theories have blamed the growth of government on budget maximizing bureaucrats who are assumedly capable of imposing their most preferred budget output combination on legislatures subject to cost and demand constraints however theoretical examination of the range of bargaining outcomes that might occur between bureau and legislature shows that budget maximizing behavior does not necessarily lead to super optimal levels of production nor do the suggested reforms of competition and privatization necessarily improve the situation in this bargaining model the central determinants of governmental growth are not budget maximizing bureaucrats but the legislature s decisions regarding mode of oversight and form of internal organization

an adaptive model of bureaucratic politics in this article we outline a new framework for the formal analysis of bureaucratic politics it departs from standard neoclassical approaches notably those of niskanen 1971 and peltzman 1976 in several important respects first our approach explicitly models a system of three way interaction among bureaus politicians and interest groups second it allows for institutional features of each type of participant third it is a model of dynamic process fourth participants make choices adoptively rather than optimizing fifth participants are only minimally informed the result is a dynamic model of adaptive behavior very much in the spirit of simon s 1947 behavioral tradition that offers a new perspective on political control bureaucratic power and the intelligence of democracy

the president and the distribution of federal spending scholarship on distributive politics focuses almost exclusively on the internal operations of congress paying particular attention to committees and majority parties this article highlights the president who has extensive opportunities both ex ante and ex post to influence the distribution of federal outlays we analyze two databases that track the geographic spending of nearly every domestic program over a 24 year period the largest and most comprehensive panels of federal spending patterns ever assembled using district and county fixed effects estimation strategies we find no evidence of committee influence and mixed evidence that majority party members receive larger shares of federal outlays we find that districts and counties receive systematically more federal outlays when legislators in the president s party represent them

addressing global environmental externalities transaction costs considerations is there a way to understand why some global environmental externalities are addressed effectively whereas others are not the transaction costs of defining the property rights to mitigation benefits and costs is a useful framework for such analysis this approach views international cooperation as a contractual process among country leaders to assign those property rights leaders cooperate when it serves domestic interests to do so the demand for property rights comes from those who value and stand to gain from multilateral action property rights are supplied by international agreements that specify resource access and use assign costs and benefits including outlining the size and duration of compensating transfer payments and determining who will pay and who will receive them four factors raise the transaction costs of assigning property rights i scientific uncertainty regarding mitigation benefits and costs ii varying preferences and perceptions across heterogeneous populations iii asymmetric information and iv the extent of compliance and new entry these factors are used to examine the role of transaction costs in the establishment and allocation of property rights to provide globally valued national parks implement the convention on the international trade in endangered species of wild fauna and flora execute the montreal protocol to manage emissions that damage the stratospheric ozone layer set limits on harvest of highly migratory ocean fish stocks and control greenhouse gas emissions jel d23 p14 q22 q51 q54 q58

the political economy of benefits and costs a neoclassical approach to distributive politics this essay offers a rational political explanation for the notorious inefficiency of pork barrel projects with an optimization model of legislative behavior and legislative institutions the model emphasizes the economically arbitrary from a welfare point of view importance of the geographic incidence of benefits and costs owing to the geographic basis for political representation we explore the implications of a legislator s objective function and derive conditions under which a representative legislature will select an omnibus of projects each of which exceeds the efficient scale

public spending and the paradox of supermajority rule this article examines the paradox that a supermajority rule in a legislature promotes excessive government spending we propose a simple conjecture if rent seeking coalitions dominate legislative politics and if individual legislators demands for rent seeking activities are price inelastic a change of legislative rules from simple majority to a supermajority will lead to greater public spending other things equal using data from u s state legislatures 1970 to 2007 we find that the adoption of a supermajority rule has a robust positive impact on various types of tax revenues and government expenditures

can budget institutions counteract political indiscipline the budget is an expression of political rather than economic priorities we confirm this proposition for a group of new and potential members of the european union finding that politics dominates the contemporary practice of democracy can increase budget deficits through not only ideological preferences but also more fragmented government coalitions and higher voter participation long term structural forces triggered by societal divisions and representative electoral rules have more ambiguous implications but also appear to increase budget pressures as others have also found however our most robust and hopeful finding is that budget institutions mechanisms and rules of the budget process that create checks and balances have significant value in curbing fiscal pressures even when the politics is representative but undisciplined and when long term structural forces are unfavourable stefania fabrizio and ashoka mody

why so much stability an optimistic view of the possibility of rational legislative decisionmaking recent formal models of legislatures have proved that equilibrium outcomes are extremely unlikely without either 1 extreme restrictions upon preferences or 2 constraints upon the agenda the implication is that constant instability or dictatorial manipulation is the norm in politics

the evolution of tax structures certain themes recur throughout this paper the traditional account of the evolution of tax structures through the interaction of increasing efficiency and the claims of special interests plays a role but is not the whole story different taxes create tradeoffs between the costs of administration and compliance specification of these costs creates a framework in which long term trends like the growth and centralization of revenues and the increasing dependence on direct taxation can be understood this framework applies to observable collective decisions to alter tax structures uncertainty about ultimate incidence plays a major role in such decisions it also applies to the decentralized context of adjustment and resistance this framework can be used to investigate the extent of redistribution within tax systems and of the requirement of frequent reforms to sustain redistribution against resistance the simultaneous consideration of economic and political aspects of taxation can only improve future research

fragmented fiscal policy abstract this paper explores on a panel of 19 oecd countries the role of fragmentation in determining fiscal outcomes over the 1970 95 period we first define the notion of fragmentation of fiscal policy making as the degree to which the costs of a dollar of aggregate expenditure are internalized by individual decision makers empirically this notion has two key logical components the number of decision makers and the rules of the game or the budget process in turn the number of decision makers can refer to the number of parties in a coalition or the number of ministers in the cabinet we test all these determinants against each other and against perhaps the oldest explanation of all ideology we show that cabinet size and to a lesser degree coalition size and ideology are significant and robust determinants of fiscal outcomes in particular transfers are the budget items most affected by these factors

a theory of white elephants asymmetric information in government support for technology abstract information advantages of firms over government are an important cause of policy failures in government financed technology using a game theory model such failures can be reconstructed as a situation analogous to the prisoner s dilemma in which rational individual action results in an outcome that is suboptimal for both industry and government by logic of economic theory any pareto deficient information asymmetry between industry and government qualifies as market failure the resulting policy failure therefore represents a case of government failure joined with market failure cost sharing between government and industry can solve the problem and a way to calculate the optimal level of cost sharing is shown however in many cases cost sharing is unfeasible or undesirable empirical evidence is adduced from the west german fast breeder reactor programme

minimal and maximal product differentiation in hotelling s duopoly abstract hotelling s 1929 model of duopolistic competition is re examined a family of utility functions is used which has as a special case hotelling s original utility function in a two stage location price game it is shown that an equilibrium exists when the curvature of the utility functions in the space of characteristics is sufficiently high the subgame perfect equilibrium never exhibits minimum product differentiation on the other hand not all equilibria are at maximal product differentiation

why so much stability one of duncan black s 1958 more important contributions was a classically simple proof that with complex issues and majority voting a stable outcome is unlikely this very simple proof that there would normally be no motion which can get a majority against all others and hence that any possible outcome is dominated by another has been elaborated and made more precise by later work without most improbable conditions endless cycling would be expected this is particularly true when logrolling is present as it normally is if we look at the real world however we observe not only is there no endless cycling but acts are passed with reasonable dispatch and then remain unchanged for very long periods of time thus theory and reality seem to be not only out of contact but actually in sharp conflict it is the purpose of this article to demonstrate that our existing theory when properly looked at does indeed imply a relatively stable outcome to voting in some cases however this stability will not be a true equilibrium because a random member of a large set will be chosen and then that random outcome will be left unchanged for long periods of time it does not dominate all other outcomes but is retained merely because of its particular history there are already several possible explanations for the observed stability in the literature we will take them up as they become relevant to the general line of reasoning i should however warn the reader that my own previous work including joint work with buchanan will play a major role here this may simply reflect egotism but i think that some of the early work which is now partially forgotten can provide solutions for more modern problems much recent public choice work has involved spatial models and these models frequently ignore logrolling the reason presumably is that it is very hard to put logrolling in a two dimensional diagram we shall begin considering such special models and assume that the issues are the sort that does not lead to logrolling and then turn to more complex logrolling problems with respect to the first situation in which logrolling does not occur there is already one possible explanation for the observed stability in the literature

the ec and protection the political economy this paper surveys the arguments that the creation of the ec has increased world protectionism relative to what it would otherwise have been models of tariff bargaining between trade blocks suggest some increase because the optimum tariff is higher for larger blocks but this is not inevitable models of ec decision taking suggest an increase because of the restaurant bill problem and the tendency of committees towards universalism the evidence is not enough however to be certain that a protectionist effect exists

strategic behavior by federal agencies in the allocation of public resources how do government agencies allocate program resources some authors presume that agencies seek to maximize program objectives others suggest agencies favor the districts important to the president s election in addition agencies may distribute larger program resources to those districts whose congressional representatives are best positioned to help the agency we examined how federal government agencies responded both to the 2006 election when control of congress shifted from the republican to the democratic party and to the 2010 election when the house switched from democratic to republican control we used a difference in difference analysis to evaluate the impact of each election on the agencies allocations of contracts agencies generally responded to the elections by allocating more contract resources to districts represented by the winning party however federal agencies reacted differently to changing political environments depending on the characteristics of the agency for example after the 2006 election those agencies with programs favored by republican members of congress allocated more resources to democratic districts these republican agencies presumably are the most vulnerable to the risk of losing future appropriations democratic agencies and neutral agencies facing no significant threats to their appropriations did not respond to the election as strongly finally more vulnerable districts received the most support especially by the republican agencies we reaffirmed these results by using the 2010 congressional elections in which the political orientations of the districts favored with more contract distributions was reversed

giving the people what they want the distribution of earmarks in the u s house of representatives the common wisdom in journalistic accounts of earmarking is that congress distributes earmarks on a purely political basis without any consideration for the demand for federal spending academic accounts similarly argue that factors internal to congress are preeminent in determining where earmarks go even more than for other types of pork barrel spending using earmarks appearing in the fiscal year 2008 appropriations bills i search for both chamber based and demand side determinants of the distribution of earmarks i find that both types of factors are significantly related to the number of earmarks that a house member receives this result indicates that even while earmarking members of congress are at least minimally responsive to voter preferences and calls into question whether earmarks should be treated as an outlier within the universe of spending allocation mechanisms

pork barrel politics targetable policies and fiscal federalism this article utilizes a simple model of redistributive politics with jurisdictional specific local projects to analyze the inefficiencies that arise under differing levels of targetability in both taxes transfers and local projects the ability to tactically target taxes transfers and or local projects leads political parties to engage in pandering to favored groups however in equilibrium we find that greater targetability in the set of available policies actually intensifies the competition between the political parties and so increases efficiency in the provision of local projects jel d72 h41

congressional committees and the political economy of federal outlays the literature on the organization of the united states congress has been dominated by distributive and informational theory one important source of disagreement between these two theories is their characterization of whether individual legislators can engage in pork barrel activities here we provide evidence which indicates that the pork barrel is alive and well in the contemporary united states congress we focus on whether members of power and constituency committees can direct disproportionate federal expenditures to their districts finding strong and systematic evidence of pork barrel activities by committee members provides empirical support for distributive theories of legislative organization

the political economy of fiscal consolidations in the context of recent research in political economy this paper addresses the policy problem of fiscal consolidation in terms of three types of issues i the macroeconomic effects of alternative strategies to consolidate ii the institutional setups conducive to a consolidation and iii the best strategy for implementing a consolidation in order to maximize its political feasibility one methodological feature of this survey is an emphasis on policy feasibility one methodological feature of this survey is an emphasis on policy issues in order to bridge the gap between the level of abstraction of politico economic models of fiscal policy and the issues faced by a policymaker when attempting a fiscal consolidation

transaction costs and coalition stability under majority rule 1 introduction under a majority voting rule representatives of specific political districts must bargain with representatives of other districts to build a coalition for enacting legislation that benefits their narrow constituencies but the theoretical public choice literature warns of potential for unstable majorities minimum winning coalitions divide program benefits just among their members creating incentives for those left out to entice defection by offering rewards to those who leave and form a different coalition as noted in mueller 1989 new coalitions emerge undermining the old ones leading to cyclical majorities short term programs and highly skewed distributions of program benefits 1 despite these dire predictions there is a general consensus in the literature such as tullock 1981 that programs are more stable and allocations more equal than the theory suggests 2 in an effort to explain the discrepancy between prediction and observation researchers have pointed to institutional rules and practices in congress for example as stated in shepsle and weingast 1981a and weingast and marshall 1988 the committee system provides a structure induced equilibrium that limits the possible range of vote trading and thereby helps maintain coalitions further shepsle and weingast 1981b miller and oppenheimer 1982 and collie 1988 argue that universalist sharing of program benefits enlarges the winning coalition and extends its political support 3 in this article we offer additional evidence of broad stable sharing in many programs enacted by congress by describing interstate distributions from the federal highway trusts fund htf the allocation formula for the htf was initiated in 1916 but despite wide divergence across the states in growth of various economic factors over the rest of the twentieth century such as vehicle registration and population that might have led to redirection of highway funds there were comparatively limited htf allocation adjustments analysis of state receipts from the htf relative to tax payments into the fund reveals that some states collect much more than they contribute whereas others pay in more than they receive even so interstate ratios of htf apportionments to payments have remained stable across the years varying less than changes in highway use measures would suggest going beyond this specific program we examine overall federal expenditure and tax shares among the states from 1975 to 1997 and show that there has been a similar continuity in the interstate distribution of federal funds and taxes 4 as with the highway program there is broad stable sharing of federal expenditures across the states with some receiving more than they contribute in taxes to the federal government to better understand this observed stability and use of relatively egalitarian sharing rules and to go beyond existing explanations we emphasize the desire of politicians to minimize the high transaction costs of negotiating and enforcing political coalitions politicians have incentive to prevent unraveling of political agreements to avoid the costs of searching for new coalition partners reaching agreement on the nature and distribution of program benefits and costs and verifying compliance these activities detract from a legislator s ability to address other voter concerns moreover legislators seek to protect constituent benefits accruing from long term programs that would be lost if coalitions unraveled 5 accordingly we argue that politicians assemble greater than minimum sized coalitions to build broad political support for their legislative programs offering benefits to a larger constituency in exchange for additional votes considerable negotiation over the distribution of program benefits a nd costs may be required so that once agreements are reached politicians will be loath to consider a major reallocation that could undermine the coalition

political solutions to market problems for some market failures serve as a rationale for public intervention however the fact that self interested market behavior does not always produce felicitous social consequences is not sufficient reason to draw this conclusion it is necessary to assess public performance under comparable conditions and hence to analyze self interested political behavior in the institutional structures of the public sector our approach emphasizes this institutional structure warts and all and thereby provides specific cautionary warnings about optimistic reliance on political institutions to improve upon market performance

distributive politics and the costs of centralization this paper studies the choice between centralization and decentralization of fiscal policy in a political economy setting with centralization regional delegates vote over agendas comprising sets of region specific projects the outcome is inefficient because the choice of projects is insufficiently sensitive to within region benefits the number of projects funded may be non monotonic in the strength of project externalities the efficiency gains from decentralization and the performance of constitutional rules such as majority voting which may be used to choose between decentralization and centralization are then discussed in this framework weaker externalities and more heterogeneity between regions need not increase the efficiency gain from decentralization

direct democracy and local public finances under cooperative federalism this paper exploits the introduction of the right of referenda at the local level in the german state of bavaria in 1995 to study the fiscal effects of direct democracy in the first part of the paper we establish the relationship between referenda activity and fiscal performance by using a new dataset containing information on all 2500 voter initiatives between 1995 to 2011 this selection on observables approach however suffers from obvious endogeneity problems in this application the main part of the paper exploits population dependent discontinuities in the signature and quorum requirements of referenda to implement a regression discontinuity design rdd to safeguard against co treatments that might affect fiscal outcomes simultaneously at the same thresholds we validate our results by extending the rdd approach to a difference in discontinuity did design by studying direct legislation in an archetypical cooperative federation as germany our paper extends the literature to a novel institutional setting the results indicate that in our setting and in contrast to most of the evidence from switzerland and the us direct democracy causes an expansion of local government budgets

taxation and the political economy of the tariff traditional accounts of u s tariff policy emphasize trade strategies and interest group politics this article makes a departure it opens with an observation up until world war i the tariff was the largest single source of federal government revenues it then explores the significance of tariffs as taxes theoretically and empirically in its first part the article develops a theory of taxation politics and applies it to the tariff in its second part it submits the theory to an empirical test modeling changes in u s tariff rates from 1829 to 1940 the politics of tariff revision it argues followed from two characteristics of the tariff as tax from the extent of the treasury s dependence upon it and from the distributive pattern of its burdens and benefits taken together the article concludes revenue dependence and distributive incidence account for several diverse aspects of american tariff policy including the structure of its coalitions the shifts in its objectives and the timing of its innovations

executive veto power and credit claiming the line item veto has often be heralded as an effective tool in reducing pork barrel spending a model of veto bargaining over public goods and pork barrel spending in the presence of credit claiming incentives demonstrates that the item veto does not necessarily reduce pork barrel spending and reduces the executive s ability to attain his preferred level of spending on public goods the item veto also has an ambiguous effect on the balance of power between the executive and the legislature while strengthening the position of the legislative agenda setter within the legislature

amend the old or address the new broad based legislation when proposing policies is costly if each legislator wishes to encourage other legislators to address new problems in future periods then a subgame perfect nash equilibrium can exist with the following properties 1 no legislator finds it worthwhile to make a narrow proposal that appeals to a minimum majority 2 instead legislators propose policies that appeal to all members not for fear of retaliation but rather to encourage other members to work on new problems in succeeding periods 3 in succeeding periods no legislator amends the existing broad policy we find an equilibrium with these properties in finite as well as infinite period games

pork barrel politics and electoral returns at the local level does the targeted spending of public resources provide electoral benefits for incumbents despite the attention of scholars to that question the empirical results are mixed thus far the present paper supplies insights into the electoral benefits of discretionary funding on local elections i study the consequences of pork barrel politics in 7355 competitive mayoral elections in slovakia between 2006 and 2018 finding that more grants from the central government enhance the likelihood of mayors winning reelection the same advantage applies to mayors whose municipalities receive grants in local election years the effects of the number of grants obtained as well as the timing of their distribution are however moderated by municipal population more specifically a larger number of grants and resources obtained near the end of the mayoral term provides electoral benefits only to small town mayors but give no advantage to the mayors of larger urban areas