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Party Control of State Government and the Distribution of Public Expenditures *
Author(s) -
Ansolabehere Stephen,
Snyder James M.
Publication year - 2006
Publication title -
the scandinavian journal of economics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.725
H-Index - 64
eISSN - 1467-9442
pISSN - 0347-0520
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9442.2006.00470.x
Subject(s) - distribution (mathematics) , incentive , legislature , state (computer science) , voter turnout , control (management) , government (linguistics) , turnout , economics , public economics , public administration , political economy , business , political science , voting , politics , market economy , law , mathematical analysis , linguistics , philosophy , mathematics , management , algorithm , computer science
This paper examines the effects of party control of state governments on the distribution of intergovernmental transfers across counties from 1957 to 1997. We find that the governing parties skew the distribution of funds in favor of areas that provide them with the strongest electoral support. This is borne out in two ways. (i) Counties that traditionally give the highest vote share to the governing party receive larger shares of state transfers to local governments. (ii) When control of the state government changes, the distribution of funds shifts in the direction of the new governing party. We find only weak evidence that parties reward electorally pivotal counties or counties in electorally pivotal legislative districts. Finally, we find that increased spending in a county increases voter turnout in subsequent elections. This suggests that parties have an electoral incentive to skew the distribution of funds to influence future election results, and the mechanism through which this works is “mobilization” rather than “conversion” of voters in a fixed electorate.