Partisanship, Blame Avoidance, and the Distribution of Legislative Pork

Balla, Steven J.; Lawrence, Eric; Maltzman, Forrest; Sigelman, Lee

doi:10.2307/3088396

Cited by 192 publications

(148 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…If true, members of the majority party should profit handsomely from their privileged positions within Congress and proposal powers. As one recent study summarizes, "majority party legislators should be expected to discriminate against districts represented by the minority party when allocating pork" (Balla et al 2002).…”

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confidence: 99%

“…Because the Democrats controlled the House throughout this period, however, it is impossible to infer whether a change in party control would actually alter spending patterns. Balla et al (2002) offer a blame avoidance model of distributive politics to explain earmarks for higher education. They present evidence that majority party members, all Democrats, are in fact more likely to secure earmarks, which also tend to be larger in size.…”

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confidence: 99%

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The President and the Distribution of Federal Spending

2010

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Scholarship on distributive politics focuses almost exclusively on the internal operations of Congress, paying particular attention to committees and majority parties. This article highlights the president, who has extensive opportunities, both ex ante and ex post, to influence the distribution of federal outlays. We analyze two databases that track the geographic spending of nearly every domestic program over a 24-year period—the largest and most comprehensive panels of federal spending patterns ever assembled. Using district and county fixed-effects estimation strategies, we find no evidence of committee influence and mixed evidence that majority party members receive larger shares of federal outlays. We find that districts and counties receive systematically more federal outlays when legislators in the president's party represent them.

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confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

The President and the Distribution of Federal Spending

2010

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“…First, government spending to district i, denoted by s i 2 [0; 1], increases with e¤ort a i 3 In the analysis, I will mention the results for the case in which the parties have equal number of seats in the congress. 4 Thus, the model ignores other important powers of the congress such as the powers to lay and collect taxes and imposts, to pay the debts, to provide the defense and general welfare of the society, etc. The analysis of those is left for future research.…”

Section: Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…3 The congress is assumed to perform a purely distributive task of allocating government spending into n maj + n min national districts. 4 Distributive policies (often referred to as pork barrel) are those, which bene…t only the districts in which the spending occurs. The size of the government spending is normalized to 1.…”

Section: Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Model of Party Discipline in Congress

Zudenkova

2011

SSRN Journal

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This paper studies the impacts of party discipline on allocation of scarce federal resources among national districts. In particular, I model the distribution of government spending within a two-party legislature as an asymmetric contest game between congress members, in which the majority party has a relative advantage in directing pork barrel into its partisan districts. The party leaders can enforce discipline in their corresponding parties to make their congress members support the party line, i.e., maximize the party's total share of pork barrel (rather than follow interests of their home districts). I show that if the relative advantage of the majority party in allocating government spending is not very high then in equilibrium, both leaders choose to impose discipline in their corresponding parties. Under party discipline, a per district pork-barrel share of the majority party decreases, while that of the minority party increases, relative to the allocation with no party discipline. My results therefore indicate that party discipline favors the minority party and leads to less biased distribution of government spending among national districts.JEL classi…cation: D72, H41.

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“…We treated our alternative dependent variables, restricted cosponsorship measures, amendments, and bills that became law, in a similar fashion. (Cox and Magar 1999), and allocating federal resources to their constituents (Balla et al 2002).…”

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confidence: 99%

"Stamps of Power and Conflict: Imprinting and Influence in the U.S. Senate, 1973-2009"

Liu

Srivastava

2015

AMPROC

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Gains in structural power are often assumed to lead to greater influence. Yet people vary in their ability to convert structural power into influence. We bring a temporal, historical perspective to account for this heterogeneity. We propose that-even when they have had considerable prior experience-people can acquire institution-specific imprints when they enter a new work setting and that these imprints can affect how influential they become when they later gain or lose power. In particular, we argue that those who enter the setting as part of a dominant coalition can be imprinted with a "stamp of power," which impairs their social learning and undermines their ability to translate downstream changes in power into influence. We evaluate and find support for this proposition in analyses of the U.S. Senate from 1973 to 2005.

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Partisanship, Blame Avoidance, and the Distribution of Legislative Pork

Cited by 192 publications

References 21 publications

The President and the Distribution of Federal Spending

The President and the Distribution of Federal Spending

A Model of Party Discipline in Congress

"Stamps of Power and Conflict: Imprinting and Influence in the U.S. Senate, 1973-2009"

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