Voting's Rewards: Voter Turnout, Attentive Publics, and Congressional Allocation of Federal Money

Abstract

Scholars have had limited success empirically demonstrating the importance of political participation. This study shows that political participation matters because it influences political rewards. Political participation, specifically voting, acts as a political resource for geographic groups. Voting is a resource because members of Congress seek to maximize the benefits of Federal budget allocations going to their districts. Members of Congress not only try to direct resources into their districts, but they also attempt to allocate strategically those resources to the areas that provide the best return in terms of votes. Hence, areas within congressional districts that vote at higher rates will be privileged over areas that vote at lower rates. " T he blunt truth is that politicians and officials are under no compulsion to pay much heed to classes and groups of citizens that do not vote." (Key 1949, 527) Perhaps V.O. Key expressed most succinctly the understanding that certain groups are ignored by the political system because they do not or cannot participate in politics. Despite this conventional wisdom, scholars have had limited success empirically demonstrating the relationship between political participation and political rewards. Some researchers reject the notion entirely, instead claiming that because the policy preferences and attitudes of voters and nonvoters differ only at the margins, nonvoting has no clear consequence (Highton and Wolfinger 2001;Teixeira 1992;Wolfinger and Rosenstone 1980; but see Verba, Schlozman, and Brady 1995 for evidence to the contrary). The first claim lacks evidence; the second ignores how political elites react to political participation in deciding who gets what. This study offers a clear test of the hypothesis that participation influences political rewards by examining the relationship between geographic voting patterns and the allocation of federal discretionary spending to those locations. In short, it shows that voting matters.

Voting when the stakes are high

“…Central findings here have been that political parties reward their voters by targeting spending toward districts where they have a strong position, and that pork barrel spending is rewarded by voters in recipient districts (Levitt andSnyder (1995, 1997), Martin (2003)). …”

Do politicians reward core supporters? Evidence from a discretionary grant program

“…Such pork-barrel spending gives rise to inefficiencies. 2 1 Intergovernmental grants may also be influenced by direct democracy (Feld and Schaltegger 2005), voter turnout (Martin 2003), lobbying by local politicians (Borck andOwings 2003, Dalle Nogare andKauder 2016), the electoral geography of districts (Chen 2010), and legislative representation (Knight 2008). See Curto-Grau et al (2012) on the distribution of spending in semi-democratic Spain.…”

Democratic Norms, Empirical Realities and Approaches to Improving Voter Turnout

“…There are complex reasons why this might be the case with voting: groups that are known to vote with high probability-e.g. the middle-aged-are more likely to be catered to by policy makers, such that members of largely non-voting groups over time come to the accurate realisation that policy makers pay scant attention to their needs; this further discourages them from engaging with the democratic process and reinforces the vicious cycle of disengagement and under-representation (Birch et al 2013;Griffin and Newman 2005;Hill 2006;Martin 2003).…”