Presidential Pork: Executive Veto Power and Distributive Politics

Most previous studies of the president’s role in the legislative process and the implications of veto power can be placed into two categories. The first is the application of the spatial model of agenda control. These models, which assume that the legislature has a monopoly over the legislative agenda, have typically predicted a limited role for the president in the process. The second research agenda views the veto as an institution designed to limit the distributive politics of the legislative branch. This approach generally assumes that the president uses his veto power to maximize the welfare of his entire constituency. In this paper, we relax the assumption of the universalistic president and allow the executive to have preferences over the distribution of expenditure across legislative districts. Such preferences are likely for a variety of reasons including partisanship as well as the maintenance of electoral and legislative coalitions. The formal model we develop explores the extent to which the president can alter the distribution of federal expenditures to further his partisan, electoral, and legislative goals as well as how his distributional preferences affect aggregate levels of distributive spending.