Congressional Distributive Politics and State Economic Performance

Steven Levitt and James Poterba

Public Choice, 1999, vol. 99, issue 1-2, 185-216

Abstract: States that were represented by very senior Democratic congressmen grew more quickly during the 1953-90 period than states that were represented by more junior congressional delegations. States with a large fraction of politically competitive House districts also grew faster than average. The first finding is consistent with traditional legislator-based models of distributive politics, the second with partisan models. The authors cannot detect any substantively important association between seniority, state political competition, and the geographic distribution of federal funds, so higher district-specific federal spending does not appear to be the source of the link between state economic growth and congressional representation. Copyright 1999 by Kluwer Academic Publishers

Date: 1999
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Working Paper: Congressional Distributive Politics and State Economic Performance (1994)
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