The President and the Distribution of Federal Spending

Berry, Christopher R.; Burden, Barry C.; Howell, William G.

doi:10.1017/s0003055410000377

“…Larcinese, Rizzo, and Testa (2006) study the allocation of the U.S. federal budget and show that states whose governors belong to the same party of the President receive more funds. Also for the U.S., Berry, Burden, and Howell (2010) use a large panel data set of federal outlays and show that districts and counties receive more money when their legislators are aligned with the federal President. In Portugal, Veiga and Pinho (2007) find evidence of distortions favoring municipalities ruled by the Prime Minister's party during the early years of democracy, but not in the period of established democracy.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tying Your Enemy's Hands in Close Races: The Politics of Federal Transfers in Brazil

Brollo

¹

,

Nannicini

²

2012

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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. www.econstor.eu The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn is a local and virtual international research center and a place of communication between science, politics and business. IZA is an independent nonprofit organization supported by Deutsche Post Foundation. The center is associated with the University of Bonn and offers a stimulating research environment through its international network, workshops and conferences, data service, project support, research visits and doctoral program. IZA engages in (i) original and internationally competitive research in all fields of labor economics, (ii) development of policy concepts, and (iii) dissemination of research results and concepts to the interested public. Terms of use: Documents in D I S C U S S I O N P A P E R S E R I E SIZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author. This paper uses a quasi-experimental strategy to disclose utterly political reasons behind the allocation of intergovernmental transfers in a federal state. We apply a regression discontinuity design in close elections to identify the effect of political alignment on federal transfers to municipal governments in Brazil. We find that municipalities where the mayor is affiliated with the coalition of the Brazilian President receive larger (discretionary) infrastructure transfers by about 40% in pre-election years. This effect is mainly driven by the fact that the federal government penalizes municipalities run by mayors from the opposition coalition who won by a narrow margin, thereby tying their hands for the next election.JEL Classification: C21, D72, H77

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“…2 Like Berry, Burden, and Howell (2010) and Albouy (2013), we hence focus on political alignment within the same level of government. A related strand of literature have emphasized political alignment across government tiers (e.g., Solé-Ollé and Sorribas-Navarro (2008); Brollo and Nannicini (2012); Fouirnaies and Mutlu-Eren (2015).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Local favoritism in at-large proportional representation systems

Fiva

¹

,

Halse

²

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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“…2 Christopher Berry, Barry Burden, and William Howell (2010), in their study of U.S. federal spending from 1984 to 2007 at the district and county levels, find that districts and counties whose legislators belong to the president's party, as well as those that are swing, receive more federal outlays, while the interaction term of being both swing and aligned is not significant. The aim of these studies is to show the importance of the U.S. president, vis-à-vis Congress, in the distribution of federal spending.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Party Alignment and Political Budget Cycles: The Argentine Provinces

Lema

¹

,

Streb

²

2013

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The links between subnational political budget cycles (PBCs) and the national government in federal countries have seldom been studied. We study the behavior of the budget balance, public expenditures, and revenues in Argentine provinces during the 1985-2001 period. We find that in election years public expenditures increase, but revenues also do -a result exactly contrary to the predictions of rational opportunistic models of aggregate PBCs -and the budget deficit does not increase significantly. Since the increase in provincial revenues is due to larger federal transfers, we incorporate the influence of party alignment between governors and president. Public expenditures in election years increase in aligned provinces because of larger federal transfers, without affecting the budget deficit; in contrast, the budget deficit tends to increase in unaligned provinces. The federal government thus plays a key role in subnational PBCs, with an electoral cycle in the allocation of federal transfers. JEL classification codes: D72, E62

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The President and the Distribution of Federal Spending

Cited by 273 publications

References 74 publications

Tying Your Enemy's Hands in Close Races: The Politics of Federal Transfers in Brazil

Tying Your Enemy's Hands in Close Races: The Politics of Federal Transfers in Brazil

Local favoritism in at-large proportional representation systems

Party Alignment and Political Budget Cycles: The Argentine Provinces

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