Signature Spending Politics

Abstract

We study the behavior of politicians when they have vast discretion over the allocation of public resources. We examine a unique case study from Italy, where the exogenous pandemic shock prompted Lombardy's regional government to approve a large extraordinary spending package. Most of these funds were swiftly allocated to numerous small projects through ad hoc motions proposed and signed by individual members of the regional parliament and subsequently approved through bipartisan resolutions. We leverage Large Language Models to text-mine thousands of parliamentary documents and assemble a fine grained politician-fund dataset containing detailed information on how and where these resources were distributed and which politician signed them. We document widespread pork-barrel strategies bargained with informal arrangements and driven by personal electoral rent-seeking, benefiting both majority and opposition politicians. By scraping social media data, we pinpoint the key mechanism: politicians credit claiming to boost visibility and advance their political careers.

Keywords: electoral outcomes, public spending, Large Language Models, social media, pork barell transfers, signature spending

JEL Classification: D72, D73, H72