Strategic Delegation in a Legislative Bargaining Model with Pork and Public Goods
نویسنده
چکیده
This paper examines the incentives of voters to appoint legislators with different preferences from their own. The paper adopts an underlying legislative bargaining model proposed by Volden and Wiseman (2007) in which legislators with heterogeneous preferences divide a fixed budget between a public good and pork projects (local public goods). We show that voters have an incentive to strategically delegate to affect how the budget is divided at the legislative level. When voters’ preferences for pork are not too strong, the incentives for strategic delegation exist to appoint representatives who will direct more money to the public good and not to pork projects. This generally results in at least as many representatives as districts that favor the public good. The comparative statics predict that when strategic delegation occurs, increasing the size of the legislature increases the fraction of the budget spent on the public good.
منابع مشابه
The Executive Toolbox: Building Legislative Support in a Multiparty Presidential Regime
How do presidents win legislative support under conditions of extreme multipartism? Comparative presidential research has offered two parallel answers, one relying on distributive politics and the other claiming that legislative success is a function of coalition formation. The authors merge these insights in an integrated approach to executive-legislative relations while also considering dynam...
متن کاملBargaining in Legislatures over Particularistic and Collective Goods
We develop a bargaining model in which a legislature divides a budget among particularistic and collective goods. By incorporating both private and public goods in a unified model, we uncover nonmonotonic relationships between legislative preferences for collective spending and the amount of the budget actually allocated to collective goods. Put simply, policy proposers can exploit coalition pa...
متن کاملPork Versus Public Goods: An Experimental Study of Public Good Provision Within a Legislative Bargaining Framework
We experimentally investigate a legislative bargaining model with both public and particularistic goods. Consistent with the qualitative implications of the model: There is near exclusive public good provision in the pure public good region, in the pure private good region minimum winning coalitions sharing private goods predominate, and in the “mixed” region proposers generally take some parti...
متن کاملIne ffi ciency in Legislative Policy - Making : A Dynamic Analysis
This paper develops an infinite horizon model of public spending and taxation in which policy decisions are determined by legislative bargaining. The policy space incorporates both productive and distributive public spending and distortionary taxation. The productive spending is investing in a public good that benefits all citizens (e.g., national defense or air quality) and the distributive sp...
متن کاملLegislative Bargaining and the Dynamics of Public Investment
Legislative Bargaining and the Dynamics of Public Investment by Marco Battaglini, Salvatore Nunnari, Thomas Palfrey * We present a legislative bargaining model of the provision of a durable public good over an infinite horizion. In each period, there is a societal endowment which can either be invested in the public good or consumed. We characterize the optimal public policy, defined by the tim...
متن کامل