Testing Models of Distributive Politics using Exit Polls to Measure Voters’ Preferences and Partisanship

Abstract

This paper tests various hypotheses about distributive politics by studying the distribution of federal spending across U.S. states over the period . We improve on previous work by using survey data to measure the share of voters in each state that are Democrats, Republicans, and independents, or liberals, conservatives and moderates. We find no evidence that the allocation of federal spending to the states is distorted by strategic manipulation to win electoral support. States with many swing voters are not advantaged compared to states with more loyal voters, nor do "battleground states" attract more federal funds. Moreover, we find that spending has little or no effect on voters' choices, whereas partisanship and ideology have massive effects.

A Room for One’s Own? The Partisan Allocation of Affordable Housing

“…Scholars disagree on whether parties and incumbents favor core voters or swing voters. Studies conducted in the (low-turnout) American context more often find support for the "core voter" model, while support for the "swing voter" model comes mainly from studies conducted outside of the United States (Larcinese, Snyder, and Testa 2013 , the bivariate correlation between the income-based proxy and actual QCT status is only .13. However, tract-level poverty rates can be easily determined from available census data.…”

The Political Economy of Unfinished Development Projects: Corruption, Clientelism, or Collective Choice?

“…I derive and test observable implications of the corruption, clientelism, and collective choice theories of noncompletion in the context of decentralized public good provision in Ghana. I overcome the endogeneity concerns that plague much of the empirical distributive politics literature (Larcinese, Snyder, and Testa 2012) by exploiting the fact that the same types of projects are delivered in the same districts and communities by the same local politicians, bureaucrats, and contractors, but funded through two different intergovernmental transfer mechanisms. These transfers are similar in design and implementation, except that one has an exogenously imposed funding rule that places districts at risk of losing future transfers if they fail to complete ongoing projects before starting new ones.…”

Citizens or Clients? Evidence on Opportunistic Voting from a Natural Experiment in Greece

“…In order to make our case, we rely on models of redistributive (Dixit and Londregan 1996; Cox 2009; Kriner and Reeves 2012; Larcinese, Snyder and Testa 2014) and machine politics (e.g., Chubb 1982; Cox and McCubbins 1986; Kitschelt et al 1999; Stokes 2005; Golden and Picci 2008; Nichter 2008; Pop-Eleches and Pop-Eleches 2012; Gans-Morse, Mazzuca and Nichter 2014). We briefly discuss some of them in the following section.…”

“…So far, scattered through the literature are empirical evidence (e.g., Wilson and Banfield 1963; Chubb 1982; Fox 1994; Kitschelt et al 1999; Stokes 2005; Nichter 2008; Pop-Eleches and Pop-Eleches 2012; Gans-Morse, Mazzuca and Nichter 2014) that political machines might target core supporters (e.g., Cox and McCubbins 1986) and swing voters (e.g., Dixit and Londregan 1996; Stokes 2005) alike, either via “pork-barrel” spending, government hand-outs and in-kind transfers or by offering access to various social services and public sector jobs (e.g., Stokes 2005; Nichter 2008; Robinson and Verdier 2013) in order to get their vote. More recently, the important role of electorally motivated public spending in securing electoral support for dominant parties have received renewed attention in the context of advanced industrialized democracies as well (e.g., Kriner and Reeves 2012; Larcinese, Snyder and Testa 2014; Matakos and Xefteris 2013).…”