Presidential Particularism in Disaster Declarations and Military Base Closures

Do presidents and members of Congress bring fundamentally different orientations to public policy decisions, particularly those concerning distributive politics? The conventional wisdom, both in the punditry and the academy, is clear. Members of Congress are mostly parochial; they often prioritize the needs of their local constituencies over those of the nation as a whole. By contrast, presidents are universalistic. As the sole representatives of all Americans, presidents are freed from parochial concerns and instead incentivized to promote the general welfare. The logic is intuitive; its implications are powerful. But is the claim and the assumptions that underlie it true? In our book, The Particularistic President (Kriner and Reeves 2015b), we examine the extent to which this oft-invoked conception accurately portrays the policies that presidents pursue, specifically within the realm of distributive politics, broadly defined. We argue that presidents routinely depart from the norms of the universalistic framework, which asserts that presidents are primarily, if not solely, driven to pursue policies that benefit the nation as a whole rather than any specific constituency. Instead, we argue that presidents have strong incentives to be particularistic, that is, to prioritize the needs and desires of some citizens over others when pursuing their agendas. Presidents do not serve as a desperately needed constraint on parochial policies. Rather, presidents inject significant political inequality into the allocation of federal resources across the country, inequalities that rival and may often even far exceed those produced by a parochial Congress. In this article, we elaborate and expand upon several of the analyses of presidential particularistic behavior developed in the book. The article proceeds in four parts. First, we briefly review two of the most important incentives that drive presidential particularism: electoral forces and partisan pressures. Second, we extend our analysis of presidential particularism in a venue where presidents enjoy unilateral authority and where normatively we would hope that objective need alone, and not political imperatives, would govern the geographic allocation of federal resources: natural disaster declarations. We then build on and extend our analysis of military base closings to examine whether both electoral and partisan incentives influenced presidential actions in the national security sphere that also had implications for distributive politics. Finally, we conclude by discussing several promising avenues of future research that can further our understanding of presidential particularism and its place in presidential politics writ large. Pork Barreling and American Politics The pork barreling legislator is an indelible image imprinted upon our national consciousness, and history is replete with examples of members of Congress prioritizing the needs of their local constituencies over the national interest. Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia was unabashedly proud of his prowess in delivering as many federal dollars as he could to his socioeconomically disadvantaged home state. He wrote in his autobiography (Byrd 2005, 149): "I lost no opportunity to promote funding for programs and projects of benefit to the people back home." So voracious and successful was Byrd in his pursuit of federal dollars that his monikers included the "king" or "pope" of pork. Not to be outdone, Alaska's Don Young used his vantage point atop the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee to champion the infamous "Bridge to Nowhere", a $25 million project to connect Ketchikan Alaska with sparsely populated Gravina Island. These and a myriad of similar examples illustrate a larger truism concerning congressional politics. Members of Congress are institutionally compelled to wear two hats simultaneously. On one hand, they are members of the national legislature charged with crafting policies that serve the needs of the nation. …