Representation and Public Policy: The Consequences of Senate Apportionment for the Geographic Distribution of Federal Funds

Lee, Frances E.

doi:10.2307/2648000

Cited by 119 publications

(90 citation statements)

References 34 publications

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“…6 The fixed effects also capture any time-invariant state-level factors that influence federal spending, such as advantages or disadvantages due to malapportionment in the Senate (Lee 1998).…”

Section: Who Does the President Target?mentioning

confidence: 99%

The President and the Distribution of Federal Spending

2010

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Scholarship on distributive politics focuses almost exclusively on the internal operations of Congress, paying particular attention to committees and majority parties. This article highlights the president, who has extensive opportunities, both ex ante and ex post, to influence the distribution of federal outlays. We analyze two databases that track the geographic spending of nearly every domestic program over a 24-year period—the largest and most comprehensive panels of federal spending patterns ever assembled. Using district and county fixed-effects estimation strategies, we find no evidence of committee influence and mixed evidence that majority party members receive larger shares of federal outlays. We find that districts and counties receive systematically more federal outlays when legislators in the president's party represent them.

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Section: Who Does the President Target?mentioning

confidence: 99%

The President and the Distribution of Federal Spending

2010

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“…Second, although there are good theoretical reasons for analyzing more specific categories of federal funds (Lee (2003) offers a compelling argument for analyzing earmarks in particular), there is little agreement about the types of funding over which legislators have distributive discretion. For example, Lee (1998) finds that funds distributed on the basis of congressionally-mandated formulas rather than discretionary funds are most affected by malapportionment. Levitt and Snyder (1995), on the other hand, classify as discretionary only those programs with relatively high coefficients of variation across districts, leading them to classify programs such as food stamps as discretionary but Medicare as non-discretionary.…”

Section: Measuring Distributionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Woon (2007), and Lee (1998), we take the natural log of RRI to make gains and losses of equal representation symmetric and so that coefficients can be interpreted as elasticities. Table 2 shows the distribution of logged RRI immediately before and immediately after each of the past four apportionments the points in each cycle when representation is most unequal and equal, respectively.…”

Section: Measuring Representationmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Apportionment Cycles as Natural Experiments

2009

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Although there are compelling theoretical reasons to believe that unequal political representation in a legislature leads to an unequal distribution of funds, testing such theories empirically is challenging because it is difficult to separate the effects of representation from the effects of either population levels or changes. We leverage the natural experiment generated by infrequent and discrete census apportionment cycles to estimate the distributional effects of malapportionment in the U.S. House of Representatives. We find that changes in representation cause changes in the distribution of federal outlays to the states. Our method is exportable to any democratic system in which reapportionments are regular, infrequent, and nonstrategic.

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“…In an examination of the consequences of senate apportionment for the geographical distribution of federal funds, Lee (1998) et.al., 2015, Lazarus and Steigerwalt, 2009and Carsey and Rundquist, 1999.…”

Section: Political Factorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Essays on Intergovernmental Fiscal Relationship

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Representation and Public Policy: The Consequences of Senate Apportionment for the Geographic Distribution of Federal Funds

Cited by 119 publications

References 34 publications

The President and the Distribution of Federal Spending

The President and the Distribution of Federal Spending

Apportionment Cycles as Natural Experiments

Essays on Intergovernmental Fiscal Relationship

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