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.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 65-85 |
| Number of pages | 21 |
| Journal | Public Choice |
| Volume | 185 |
| Issue number | 1-2 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 1 Oct 2020 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:We wish to thank participants at the Israeli Economic Association annual meeting, as well as seminar participants at the school of Political Science at Tel Aviv University for helpfull comments and suggestions. We would also like to thank Christofer Berry, Barry Burden and William Howell for sharing their data with us.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.
Keywords
- Congress
- Democrats
- Distributive spending
- Partisan alignment
- President
- Republicans
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Sociology and Political Science
- Economics and Econometrics