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Pork barrel politics and electoral returns at the local level

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Abstract

Does the targeted spending of public resources provide electoral benefits for incumbents? Despite the attention of scholars to that question, the empirical results are mixed thus far. The present paper supplies insights into the electoral benefits of discretionary funding on local elections. I study the consequences of pork-barrel politics in 7355 competitive mayoral elections in Slovakia between 2006 and 2018, finding that more grants from the central government enhance the likelihood of mayors winning reelection. The same advantage applies to mayors whose municipalities receive grants in local election years. The effects of the number of grants obtained as well as the timing of their distribution are, however, moderated by municipal population. More specifically, a larger number of grants and resources obtained near the end of the mayoral term provides electoral benefits only to small town mayors but give no advantage to the mayors of larger urban areas.

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Notes

  1. The choice of the dependent variable, however, does not alter the results. When the vote shares of mayors are entered on the right-hand side, the findings do not change in a meaningful way; see Sect. 4.

  2. Inclusion of the variable raises the question of its relation to the quantity of grants the towns obtain given that a larger number of grants means more income for municipalities. Based on Pearson’s correlation coefficient, the two variables are moderately positively associated (r = 0.45). A multicollinearity check shows no problems for the purposes of the regression analysis.

  3. It is important to note that smaller municipalities in Central and Eastern Europe tend to be weaker economically than larger towns. Given their smaller populations, the same value of grants received translates into larger per capita grants in a smaller village than in a larger city, which needs to be taken into consideration. To address that issue, I reestimated the models using the values of grants instead of per capita grants and found no differences in the results obtained. The same applies if interaction between population size and the value of grants per capita is entered in the models. The results of the empirical analysis remain unchanged and the quantity of money does not affect the reelection of mayors regardless of municipality size.

  4. I also controlled for whether municipalities whose mayors faced a larger number of challengers in the previous election are more successful in obtaining grants in the following term. Despite mayors having no formal powers to influence the distribution of grants, they might engage in lobbying or apply other forms of informal pressure. However, I found no association between the number of challengers in the previous election and the grants obtained in the following term, be it the number of grants received (r = − 0.02) or grants secured in the election year (r = − 0.05).

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Acknowledgements

I thank two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions. I also thank Petr Voda and Miroslav Nemčok for their time and their feedback. This study was funded by Czech Science Foundation (GA18-16928S).

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  1. Department of Political Science, Faculty of Social Studies, Masaryk University, Joštova 10, 602 00, Brno, Czech Republic

    Peter Spáč

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Appendix

Appendix

Number of municipalities based on population size (logged scale).

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Spáč, P. Pork barrel politics and electoral returns at the local level. Public Choice 188, 479–501 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-020-00841-2

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