Legislators’ pursuit of federal funding for their home districts represents a core element of congressional representation. Distributive politics is often characterized as less partisan than other aspects of congressional behavior, but it is unclear how legislator party affiliation affects district spending. I use a regression discontinuity design, leveraging close congressional elections, to examine whether Democratic and Republican MCs pursue different magnitudes and types of distributive benefits. Focusing on the years following a close election, I find that districts where Republicans narrowly win tend to receive more federal funding than districts where Democrats narrowly win. However, the effect of MC partisanship on district spending is not immediate – a distinguishable effect emerges only when the window of observation is expanded from one congress to two congresses following a close election. Finally, I separate spending by policy area and find that the general Republican funding advantage stems from transportation and agriculture spending.
As appropriations earmarks return to Congress, every legislator faces a decision: pursue or refuse congressionally mandated federal spending projects. This decision is likely influenced by public messaging concerns. We theorize that both credit claiming for federal projects and position taking against spending projects (“pork busting”) can benefit legislators as they look to improve future electoral returns. We field a nationally representative survey experiment to estimate the effect of credit‐claiming and pork‐busting messages on the perceived effectiveness, fiscal responsibility, and overall approval of an unnamed member of Congress. We find that respondents are likely to penalize the representative's approval assessment when presented with an out‐party message strategy. Conversely, respondents are likely to increase the representative's personal trait assessments when presented with an in‐party message strategy. We expand on these results in an additional analysis and find that these trends persist when controlling for other partisan and demographic factors. We discuss our results in light of traditional expectations, potential mechanisms, and future directions for related research.
In 2010, the United States Congress placed a moratorium on earmarks – congressionally mandated spending projects. But did the earmark moratorium actually rid public policy of earmarks? I use earmark data and 2010–2020 state-level highway funding metrics to examine the relationship between previously expired transportation earmarks and federal highway funding during the earmark moratorium. Earmarks in the 2005 surface transportation law (SAFETEA-LU) continued to benefit certain states in 2020, even though the projects technically expired in 2009. This is because the funding “formulas” established by all post-2009 surface transportation laws were fully determined by the highway allocation percentage each state received in the preceding year, inclusive of earmarks. Further, I find the relationship between SAFETEA-LU earmarks and state funding disparities strengthened from 2010 to 2020, meaning the expired earmarks increased in policy significance during the moratorium. Highly earmarked states became even more advantaged after the earmarks were institutionalised into the highway funding formula.
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