Journal ArticleDOI
The Determinants of Success of Special Interests in Redistributive Politics
Avinash Dixit,John Londregan +1 more
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In this paper, the authors examine what determines whether an interest group will receive favors in pork-barrel politics, using a model of majority voting with two competing parties, where each group's membership is heterogeneous in its ideological affinity for the parties.Abstract:
We examine what determines whether an interest group will receive favors in pork-barrel politics, using a model of majority voting with two competing parties. Each group's membership is heterogeneous in its ideological affinity for the parties. Individuals face a trade-off between party affinity and their own transfer receipts. The model is general enough to yield two often-discussed but competing theories as special cases. If the parties are equally effective in delivering transfers to any group, then the outcome of the process conforms to the "swing voter" theory: both parties woo the groups that are politically central, and most willing to switch their votes in response to economic favors. If groups have party affinities, and each party is more effective in delivering favors to its own support group, then we can get the "machine politics" outcome, where each party favors its core support group. We derive these results theoretically, and illustrate their operation in particular examples.read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
Pork Barrel Politics in Postwar Italy, 1953-1994
TL;DR: The authors analyzes the political determinants of the distribution of infrastructure expenditures by the Italian government to the country's 92 provinces between 1953 and 1994 and finds that when districts elect politically more powerful deputies from the governing parties, they receive more investments.
Posted Content
The Return to Protectionism
TL;DR: This paper analyzed the impacts of the 2018 trade war on the U.S. economy and found that tradeable-sector workers in heavily Republican counties were the most negatively affected by the trade war.
Journal ArticleDOI
Ethnic Quotas and Political Mobilization: Caste, Parties, and Distribution in Indian Village Councils
Thad Dunning,Janhavi Nilekani +1 more
TL;DR: In this article, the authors evaluate the impact of ethnic quotas for the presidencies of village councils in India and find weak distributive effects of quotas for marginalized castes and tribes, but suggestive evidence of the importance of partisanship.
Journal ArticleDOI
Can Informed Public Deliberation Overcome Clientelism? Experimental Evidence from Benin
TL;DR: The authors provided experimental evidence on the effect of "informed" town hall meetings on electoral support for programmatic, non-clientelist platforms and found that the treatment has a positive effect on self-perceived knowledge about policies and candidates.
Book ChapterDOI
Political Representation: Swing voters, core voters, and distributive politics
Abstract: How do political parties allocate targetable goods – such as private goods targeted to individuals, local public goods targeted to geographic areas, or tax breaks targeted to specific industries or firms – in order to optimize their electoral prospects? A continuing debate on this question pits those who lean toward Cox and McCubbins's (1986) “core voter model” against those who lean toward Lindbeck and Weibull's (1987) “swing voter model.” Both models envision two parties competing to win an election by promising to distribute targetable goods to various groups, should they be elected. Cox and McCubbins argue that vote-maximizing parties will allocate distributive benefits primarily to their core voters. A typical response embodying the swing voter logic is Stokes's (2005: 317): “voters who are predisposed in favor of [a party] on partisan or programmatic grounds [– that is, its core voters –] cannot credibly threaten to punish their favored party if it withholds [distributive] rewards. Therefore the party should not waste rewards on them.” In this chapter, I first review the literature and then note that extant models focus solely on persuasion (defined as an attempt to change voters' preferences between given alternatives). Once one brings coordination (defined as an attempt to affect the number and character of alternatives from which voters choose) and mobilization (defined as an attempt to affect whether or not citizens participate in the election) into analytic view, the argument that vote-maximizing parties should focus their distributive benefits on core voters is substantially strengthened.
References
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Book
An Economic Theory of Democracy
TL;DR: Downs presents a rational calculus of voting that has inspired much of the later work on voting and turnout as discussed by the authors, particularly significant was his conclusion that a rational voter should almost never bother to vote.
Journal ArticleDOI
Balanced-budget redistribution as the outcome of political competition
Assar Lindbeck,Jörgen W. Weibull +1 more
TL;DR: In this article, balanced budget redistribution between socioeconomic groups is modeled as the outcome of electoral competition between two political parties, and a sufficient condition for existence is given, requiring that there be enough heterogeneity with respect to party preferences in the electorate.
Journal ArticleDOI
Electoral Politics as a Redistributive Game
Gary W. Cox,Mathew D. McCubbins +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that the optimal strategy for risk-averse candidates will be to promise redistributions first and foremost to their reelection constituency and thereby to maintain existing political coalitions.
Journal ArticleDOI
Political Preferences for the Pork Barrel: A Generalization
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors provide a rational explanation for the observation of oversized coalitions, often approaching unanimous size, in the realm of distributive policies, i.e., policies which concentrate benefits in specific geographic areas (states, congressional districts) while spreading costs through general taxation.
Journal ArticleDOI
Incentives to cultivate favored minorities under alternative electoral systems
TL;DR: In this article, a simple game model is used to compare the incentives for candidates to create inequalities among otherwise homogeneous voters, by making campaign promises that favor small groups, rather than appealing equally to all voters.
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