Party Discipline and Pork-Barrel Politics
30 Pages Posted: 20 Oct 2005
There are 3 versions of this paper
Party Discipline and Pork Barrel Politics
Date Written: September 2005
Abstract
Polities differ in the extent to which political parties can pre-commit to carry out promised policy actions if they take power. Commitment problems may arise due to a divergence between the ex ante incentives facing national parties that seek to capture control of the legislature and the ex post incentives facing individual legislators, whose interests may be more parochial. We study how differences in "party discipline" shape fiscal policy choices. In particular, we examine the determinants of national spending on local public goods in a three-stage game of campaign rhetoric, voting, and legislative decision-making. We find that the rhetoric and reality of pork-barrel spending, and also the efficiency of the spending regime, bear a non-monotonic relationship to the degree of party discipline.
Keywords: Political economy, electoral competition, public goods, party politics
JEL Classification: D72, H41
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
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Party Discipline and Pork-Barrel Politics
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