Targeting Ordinary Voters or Political Elites? Why Pork Is Distributed Along Partisan Lines in India

Abstract A key finding in the political economy literature is that political elites display partisan biases when allocating public resources. While previous studies posit that such biases are driven by politicians' motivations to target benefits directly to certain groups of ordinary voters, this article develops the argument that national politicians also target pork along partisan lines to win over politicians at lower levels of government whose cooperation they need to ensure the successful implementation of development projects. Using a quasi‐experimental design, the argument is tested with data on thousands of public works projects sanctioned by MPs in North India. The results show that, even controlling for unobserved differences in voter characteristics, MPs systematically favored the constituencies of co‐partisan state legislators when allocating pork specifically under conditions implied by the argument and not otherwise. These results shed new light on the reasons for partisan biases in resource allocation in multilevel systems.