The pork-barrel diet

Pandering and Pork-Barrel Politics∗

We develop a model of pork-barrel politics in which a government offi cial tries to improve her re-election chances by spending on targeted interest groups. The spending signals that she shares their concerns. We investigate the effect of such pandering on the public deficit. Pandering makes the deficit worse if either the offi cial’s overall spending propensity is known, or if it is unknown bu...

Pork Barrel Politics & Japanese Coalition Formation

Party Discipline and Pork-Barrel Politics

Polities di¤er 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 di¤ere...

FS IV 02 – 09 Contribution to Productivity or Pork Barrel ? The Two Faces of Infrastructure Investment

Contribution to Productivity or Pork Barrel? The Two Faces of Infrastructure Investment* by Olivier Cadot, Lars-Hendrik Röller and Andreas Stephan This paper proposes a simultaneous-equation approach to the estimation of the contribution of transport infrastructure accumulation to regional growth. We model explicitly the political-economy process driving infrastructure investments; in doing so,...

Contribution to productivity or pork barrel? The two faces of infrastructure investment

Contribution to Productivity or Pork Barrel? The Two Faces of Infrastructure Investment* by Olivier Cadot, Lars-Hendrik Röller and Andreas Stephan This paper proposes a simultaneous-equation approach to the estimation of the contribution of transport infrastructure accumulation to regional growth. We model explicitly the political-economy process driving infrastructure investments; in doing so,...