The Presidential Pork Barrel and the Conditioning Effect of Term

There have been numerous analyses of how presidential election rules and pressures shape campaign behavior. Shaw (1999) and Hill and McKee (2005) reveal, for example, that presidential candidates expend more resources in states with uncertain outcomes--these are sometimes called "battleground" states. Surprisingly little has been done on the effects of elections on presidential governance, however. Some anecdotal evidence suggests that presidents make policy that favors battleground states. Witness, for instance, the Bush administration's imposition of tariffs on steel imports during 2002-2003 that, many argued, was designed to attract support from the domestic industry's home states of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia--all of them up for grabs in the 2004 presidential contest (Broder 2002). This is something Karl Rove called "asset deployment" (Solomon, MacGillis, and Cohen 2007). Other impressionistic evidence suggests that presidents advantage those states that provided them with the most support in their election. There have been reports that New York has received disproportionately little of federal homeland security money in the past few years because it is solidly Democratic (Newfield 2004). Two hypotheses about federal government spending and presidential elections reflect these casual observations. The first is the battleground hypothesis. It asserts that states that are evenly balanced between the two parties will receive a disproportionate amount of federal largesse as presidents attempt to curry favor for the upcoming election. The second is the presidential-support hypothesis. It posits that presidents reward states whose voters supported them in disproportionately large numbers in the previous election. This article is a contribution to the small but growing literature that tests these hypotheses and examines what might be called the presidential pork barrel. It adds value in two ways. First, it focuses on a category of spending, procurement, that has not been examined this way before. Procurement is particularly suited to a test of these hypotheses. It is, for instance, clearly distributive in nature. A problem with Larcinese, Rizzo, and Testa's (2006) recent study is that they use aggregate federal spending per capita to confirm the presidential support hypothesis. A significant proportion of this measure is in the form of direct payments to individuals--policy the president has little ability to alter unilaterally because it is established by prearranged statutorily derived formulae. Efforts to alter geographic patterns of this type of spending are likely to be shaped by partisan and ideological struggles. Second, the article examines the conditioning effect of term. No other study of this issue has looked at presidential term, but it makes sense to assume that the vote-buying imperatives of the two hypotheses are greatly attenuated or completely absent in presidents' second terms. Forced from the ballot by the Twenty-Second Amendment, second-term presidents do not need to use distributive spending to buy popular votes. Theoretical Underpinnings and Hypotheses If distributive spending is used for electoral purposes, the fundamental assumption is generally that elected officials "buy" the votes of constituents by directing government largesse to them. The more spending their constituents receive, the greater the chances elected officials have of receiving their votes and winning the election. The president's constituency is the nation. However, the Electoral College breaks this constituency into fifty-one discrete units--the fifty states plus the District of Columbia. Each state has the same number of electoral votes as it has members of Congress, and candidates must win a majority of these votes (at least 270) to become or remain president. What is more, with the exception of Maine and Nebraska, all states use the unit rule, which means they distribute their electoral votes en bloc to the candidate who wins a plurality of their popular vote. …