The political economy of infrastructure: the Spanish “parliamentary roads” (1880-1914)

Marta Curto-Grau (), Alfonso Herranz-Loncán and Albert Solé-Ollé
Additional contact information
Marta Curto-Grau: Departament d'Economia Política i Hisenda Pública; Universitat de Barcelona; Facultat d'Economia i Empresa - Av. Diagonal, 690 (08034 Barcelona).

No 1008, Documentos de Trabajo (DT-AEHE) from Asociación Española de Historia Económica

Abstract: This paper examines the extent to which the public allocation of road investment was influenced by political and electoral goals during the Spanish Restoration (1874-1923). More precisely, we seek to identify those provinces that were favoured with higher road construction expenditure and whether tactical strategies adopted by the political parties varied over time to reflect increasing political competition. In so doing, this paper combines concepts from three strands of literature: legislative pork-barrel; clientelism and machine politics; and electoral competition. Our main empirical finding for a panel of Spanish provinces between 1880 and 1914 suggests that constituencies electing a higher proportion of deputies from minority or opposition parties were initially punished through lower levels of road investment but that, by the end of the period, they were instead favoured with more resources than the rest. In addition, we also observe that senior deputies who had been ministers in previous administrations were more capable than other politicians of attracting resources to their constituencies.

Keywords: road investment; distributive politics; electoral competition; vote buying (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 H54 P16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 36 pages
Date: 2010-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-his, nep-pbe and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://media.timtul.com/media/web_aehe/dt-aehe-1008_20240108095034.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ahe:dtaehe:1008

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Documentos de Trabajo (DT-AEHE) from Asociación Española de Historia Económica Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Andreu Seguí Beltrán ().