Partisan Pork Barrel in Parliamentary Systems: Australian Constiuency-Level Grants

Abstract

This note examines the distributive calculus of the Australian Labor government in apportioning millions of dollars of constituency-level grants in the weeks preceding the 1990 and 1993 Australian federal elections. While parliamentary systems have long been assumed to stymie constituencylevel electoral effects-given their foundation on party government, caucus discipline, and voter loyalties directed to parties, not candidates-they also create a collective incentive for the party in government to pursue victories in its most marginal seats, including the tactical apportioning of discretionary funds. The results confirm a distinctly parliamentary form of distributive politics dominated by partisan and marginal seats priorities, while the decision-making influence of cabinet members appears sufficient to secure them funds disproportionate to their marginality.

Yes, Minister: The Impact of Decision-making Rules on Geographically Targeted Particularistic Spending

“…In general, scholars of particularistic spending have tended to focus on infrastructure spending or social welfare policy, or indeed locally targeted discretionary grants such as sports grants (Denemark 2000 Grants was set up in 1988 funded exclusively from National Lottery income.…”

“…Despite these theoretical expectations, evidence of geographically-targeted spending (hereafter GTS) aimed at electoral gain has been found around the world regardless of electoral system. Australia (Denemark 2000), Brazil (Ames 2001(Ames , 1995, Canada (Milligan and Smart 2005), England (John, Ward, and Dowding 2004), France (Cadot, Röller, and Stephan 2006), Germany (Stratmann and Baur 2002), India (Dasgupta, Dhillon, and Dutta 2001), Japan (Thies 1998;Horiuchi and Saito 2003) to Scandinavia (Tavits 2009;Dahlberg and Johansson 2002) among others, all have geographically targeted spending. The absence of empirically-supported explanations of cross-country variation 1 would suggest the theoretical basis for geographically targeted spending is not fully developed.…”

Pork Barrel Politics in Postwar Italy, 1953-1994

“…Advances in data availability now permit extension of this line of research to other countries. Results identify patterns of partisan-political distributive politics in nations as diverse as Albania (Case 2001), Argentina (Calvo and Murillo 2004;Porto and Sanguinetti 2001), Australia (Denemark 2000;Worthington and Dollery 1998), Brazil (Ames 2001), Canada (Kneebone and McKenzie 2001), Colombia (Crisp and Ingall 2002) England (Ward and John 1999;John and Ward 2001), France (Cadot, Röller, and Stephan 2006), Germany (Stratmann and Baur 2002), India (Rao and Singh 2005), Japan (Horiuchi and Saito 2003), Mexico (Magaloni 2006, ch. 4), Peru (Schady 2000), Russia (Treisman 1996), South Korea (Kwon 2005), and Sweden (Dahlberg and Johansson 2002), as well as across Africa (Kasara 2007).…”

Distributive Politics with Primaries

“…Case (2001) finds that during the Berisha administration in Albania block grants tended to be targeted at swing communes. Denemark (2000) also finds evidence that marginal seats in Australia receive a disproportionate amount of local community sports grants.…”