Polities differ 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 differences in "party discipline" shape fiscal 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 find that the rhetoric and reality of pork-barrel spending, and also the efficiency of the spending regime, bear a non-monotonic relationship to the degree of party discipline.
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Paper provided by Princeton University, Research Program in Political Economy in its series Papers with number
08-10-2005.
Find related papers by JEL classification: D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Models of Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior
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Torsten Persson & Gerard Roland & Guido Tabellini, .
"Comparative Politics and Public Finance,"
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114, IGIER (Innocenzo Gasparini Institute for Economic Research), Bocconi University.
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Grossman, Gene M. & Helpman, Elhanan, 2004.
"A Protectionist Bias in Majoritarian Politics,"
Papers
12-21-2004, Princeton University, Research Program in Political Economy.
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Allan Drazen & Marcela Eslava, 2006.
"Pork Barrel Cycles,"
NBER Working Papers
12190, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
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