Party Discipline and Pork-Barrel Politics
نویسنده
چکیده
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¤erences in party discipline shape scal 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 nd that the rhetoric and reality of pork-barrel spending, and also the e¢ ciency 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 Classi cation: D72, H41 We are grateful to Itay Fainmesser and Ran Melamed for outstanding research assistance and to Ken Shepsle, Dennis Epple and other participants at the meeting of the Political Institutions and Economic Policy (PIEP) Research Group for helpful comments and suggestions. We acknowledge with thanks the support of the National Science Foundation (SES 0211748 and SES 0451712) and the US-Israel Binational Science Foundation (2002132). Helpmans work for this paper was done when he was Sackler Visiting Professor at Tel Aviv University.
منابع مشابه
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...
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