Apportionment Cycles as Natural Experiments

Elis, Roy; Malhotra, Neil; Meredith, Marc

doi:10.1093/pan/mpp012

Cited by 16 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…More recently, Ansolabehere, Gerber, and Snyder (2002) show that counties which lost seats due to redistricting received less state funds than they did before. Elis, Malhotra, and Meredith (2009) find similar effects of reapportionment in the U.S. House. Knight (2008) finds that U.S. states which are over-represented in the Senate receive relatively higher spending from this chamber.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 60%

Local favoritism in at-large proportional representation systems

Fiva

Halse

2016

Journal of Public Economics

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Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Pork barrel spending is typically attributed to the strategic behavior of political elites hoping to be electorally rewarded by voters residing in their districts. Such behavior is expected to depend on the incentives imposed by the electoral system. We estimate the causal effect of local representation in a closed list proportional representation system where individual candidates have no clear electoral incentive to favor their hometown. Using data from Norwegian regional governments, we still find a hometown bias. We document that municipalities with a representative on the regional council from the same party as the governor tend to obtain more funding for local investments. In an extension we show that citizens also tend to vote more often for parties with a governor candidate from their own hometown, consistent with an expectation of particularistic benefits. Both effects are driven by municipalities with below median population size. Terms of use: Documents inJEL-Code: D720, H720, H770.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 60%

Local favoritism in at-large proportional representation systems

Fiva

Halse

2016

Journal of Public Economics

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“…These problems could be overcome if an exogenous source of variation in malapportionment could be identified, like in Elis et al (2009), which uses periodic reapportionments in the House, or in Ansolabehere et al (2002) and Ansolabehere and Snyder (2008), which exploit court-ordered reapportionment of state legislatures. Unfortunately, in the case of the Senate, the only determinant of variation in malapportionment is population.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Why Do Small States Receive More Federal Money? U.S. Senate Representation and the Allocation of Federal Budget

Larcinese

Rizzo

Testa

2013

Economics & Politics

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In this paper we provide new evidence on the importance of the so-called small state advantage for the allocation of the US federal budget. We also provide a new interpretation of the available empirical evidence. Analyzing outlays for the period 1978-2002, we show that not only does the population size of a state matter, but so too does its dynamics. Once population scale and change effects are separated, the impact of population size is substantially reduced, and population change turns out to be an important explanatory variable of current spending patterns. The impact of scale and change effects varies substantially across spending programs. Small states enjoy an advantage in defense spending, whereas fast growing ones are penalized in grants allocations. Our results imply that the interests of the states are not easily aligned around their population size alone. The distortion associated with population dynamics is concentrated on federal grants where formulas play a substantial role in limiting budgetary adjustments. Hence, a large part of the inverse relationship between spending and population appears to be driven by mechanisms of budgetary inertia which are compatible with incrementalist theories of budget allocation. JEL Codes: D72, H61, H77

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“…Our analysis dovetails with other recent studies that seek to deal with the possible endogeneity of legislative representation by taking advantage of specific instances of reapportionment within countries (12,17,18) or the expansion of the European Union (19). Each of these studies finds that exogenous changes in apportionment are associated with changes in fiscal flows.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 53%

Representation and redistribution in federations

Dragu

Rodden

2011

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Many of the world's most populous democracies are political unions composed of states or provinces that are unequally represented in the national legislature. Scattered empirical studies, most of them focusing on the United States, have discovered that overrepresented states appear to receive larger shares of the national budget. Although this relationship is typically attributed to bargaining advantages associated with greater legislative representation, an important threat to empirical identification stems from the fact that the representation scheme was chosen by the provinces. Thus, it is possible that representation and fiscal transfers are both determined by other characteristics of the provinces in a specific country. To obtain an improved estimate of the relationship between representation and redistribution, we collect and analyze provincial-level data from nine federations over several decades, taking advantage of the historical process through which federations formed and expanded. Controlling for a variety of country-and province-level factors and using a variety of estimation techniques, we show that overrepresented provinces in political unions around the world are rather dramatically favored in the distribution of resources.W hen independent political units assemble to create larger entities, they often become embroiled in disputes over representation. Should each unit receive equal representation regardless of size or should representation be based on population? These battles are often fierce in nascent political unions because of the belief that the nature of representation will affect the distribution of resources across regions well into the future.In some of the world's largest democracies, the territorial representation scheme in place today had its roots in a federal bargain from the distant past that left some regions, like New York or Buenos Aires, with far fewer seats per capita than other regions, like Wyoming or La Rioja. In large or diverse nascent political unions like the European Union, Iraq, or Afghanistan, a federal institutional structure that deviates substantially from the principle of "one person, one vote" is often viewed as a requirement for peace and stability.For these federations old and new, an important but unanswered question lingers: To what extent do asymmetries in representation lead to corresponding asymmetries in government policy? Empirical studies in economics and political science have discovered that overrepresented regions appear to receive substantially larger per capita shares of government expenditures (1-4). This research consists primarily of single-country studies, most of them focusing on the United States (5-11).The fact that the representation structure emerged from a bargain among provinces, however, presents a fundamental challenge to empirical estimation of the relationship between representation and redistribution. It is possible that the most independently powerful provinces can most effectively extract both fiscal transfers and advantageous l...

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Apportionment Cycles as Natural Experiments

Cited by 16 publications

References 31 publications

Local favoritism in at-large proportional representation systems

Local favoritism in at-large proportional representation systems

Why Do Small States Receive More Federal Money? U.S. Senate Representation and the Allocation of Federal Budget

Representation and redistribution in federations

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