Working Paper No. 03-04-01 THE POLITICAL DETERMINANTS OF FEDERAL EXPENDITURE AT THE STATE LEVEL

Atlas et al. (1995) show that states with higher per capita senate representation have higher federal spending per capita. With a more recent data sample, more highly disaggregated data, and a different set of political control variables, we are able to confirm the main result of Atlas et al. that per capita senate representation is positively related to federal expenditure. This effect is strongest for procurement expenditures. By contrast, we do not find support for their result that spending increases with per capita representation in the House of Representatives. Several other political variables are found to be significant in a subset of the expenditure equations. *We would like to thank John Conlon, Sahiba Chadha, Harold Elder, Walter Enders, Robert K. Fleck, James Peoples, William F. Shughart II, Lew Silver, John J. Wallis, seminar participants at the University of Oklahoma, and participants at the 2003 Public Choice Society meeting for helpful comments and discussions relating to this project.