Agency Design and Distributive Politics

Gersen, Jacob E.; Berry, Christopher R.

doi:10.2139/ssrn.1699914

Cited by 13 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 157 publications

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“…Although much of this research has tended to focus on congressional appropriations, a number of scholars have focused on the role of the president and senior political appointees in directing the executive branch's discretionary allocation of federal funds (Berry, Burden, and Howell 2010;Berry and Gersen 2010;Bertelli and Grose 2009;Fisher 1975;Mayer 1995;Mebane and Wawro 2002;Shor 2006).…”

Section: The Bureaucracy and The Distribution Of Federal Spendingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Politicizing Agency Spending Authority: Lessons from a Bush-era Scandal

Gordon

2011

Am Polit Sci Rev

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W hen can presidents direct bureaucrats to allocate government expenditures for electoral purposes? To address this question, I exploit a scandal concerning the General Services Administration (GSA), an agency that contracts with private vendors to provide supplies and real estate to other agencies. Shortly after Republican losses in 2006, a White House deputy gave a presentation to GSA political appointees identifying potentially vulnerable congressional districts. I find that vendors in prioritized Republican districts experienced unusually large new contract actions from the GSA's Public Buildings Service following the presentation relative to unmentioned districts, a discrepancy that disappeared once the Washington Post broke the story. Contracts supervised by the agency's Federal Acquisition Service, by contrast, were largely unresponsive to the briefing and media scrutiny. My findings suggest that the extent to which executives succeed in politicizing discretionary allocation decisions depends upon key features of the implementing agency's tasks and its informational environment.

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Section: The Bureaucracy and The Distribution Of Federal Spendingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Politicizing Agency Spending Authority: Lessons from a Bush-era Scandal

Gordon

2011

Am Polit Sci Rev

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“… 8 Berry, Burden, and Howell (2010) argues that presidents desire to target federal dollars to constituencies represented by their co-partisans in Congress to build influence in the legislature. Berry and Gersen (2010, 12) shows that politicized agencies are more likely to engage in such targeting than less politicized agencies. …”

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confidence: 99%

Presidential Particularism and Divide-the-Dollar Politics

2015

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W hen influencing the allocation of federal dollars across the country, do presidents strictly pursue maximally efficient outcomes, or do they systematically target dollars to politically influential constituencies? In a county-level analysis of federal spending from 1984 to 2008, we find that presidents are not universalistic, but particularistic-that is, they reliably direct dollars to specific constituents to further their political goals. As others have noted, presidents target districts represented by their co-partisans in Congress in the pursuit of influence vis-à-vis the legislature. But we show that, at much higher levels, presidents target both counties within swing states and counties in core states that strongly supported the president in recent elections. Swing state particularism is especially salient during presidential reelection years, and core partisan counties within swing states are most heavily rewarded. Rather than strictly pursuing visions of good public policy or pandering to the national median voter, our results suggest that presidents systematically prioritize the needs of politically important constituents.

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“…Stein and Bickers (1994) and Bickers and Stein (1996) find that the flow of grant awards to U.S. Congressional districts accelerated in the wake of close district‐level election results. Gordon (2010) finds that political appointees pressured the General Services Administration to allocate more procurement to districts represented by vulnerable incumbent party members, while Berry and Gerson (2011) also find that swing districts receive more political pork overall. Case (2001) estimates the impact of the political context on block grants from the central government of Albania to local jurisdictions and finds that constituencies in which the government faced closer elections received larger transfers.…”

Section: Swing Voters With Low‐magnitude Prmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cultivating Votes in Rural Chile

Couyoumdjian

Londregan

2012

Legislative Studies Qtrly

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In Chile's two-member legislative districts we show there are two groups of swing voters, one group for the first seat won by the governing coalition, another for the second. We build a model that allows us to identify the relative prevalence of these voters across communities. Using data on the allocation of discretionary agricultural loans, we find that communities with relatively many voters pivotal for the first seat receive more loans than they otherwise would have, but we find no systematic advantage for districts that are pivotal for the second seat.

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Agency Design and Distributive Politics

Cited by 13 publications

References 157 publications

Politicizing Agency Spending Authority: Lessons from a Bush-era Scandal

Politicizing Agency Spending Authority: Lessons from a Bush-era Scandal

Presidential Particularism and Divide-the-Dollar Politics

Cultivating Votes in Rural Chile

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