TESTING MODELS OF DISTRIBUTIVE POLITICSUSING EXIT POLLS TO MEASURE VOTERPREFERENCES AND PARTISANSHIP

Valentino Larcinese, James Snyder and Cecilia Testa

STICERD - Political Economy and Public Policy Paper Series from Suntory and Toyota International Centres for Economics and Related Disciplines, LSE

Abstract: This paper tests various hypotheses about distributive politics by studying the distributionof federal spending across U.S. states over the period 1978-2002. We improve onprevious work by using survey data to measure the share of voters in each state that areDemocrats, Republicans, and independents, or liberals, conservatives and moderates. Wefind no evidence for the "swing voter" hypothesis { that is, no significant associationbetween the amount of federal funds a state receives and the fraction of independents ormoderates in the state. We also find no evidence for the "battleground state" hypothesis -no significant association between the amount of federal funds and the degree of partisanbalance in a state. Modest support is found for the \partisan supporters" hypothesis, whichconjectures that politicians will favour areas that contain a large percentage of their coresupporters.

Keywords: Electoral competition; swing voter; partisanship; election closeness; USFederal Spending. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D78 H50 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006-04
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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https://sticerd.lse.ac.uk/dps/pepp/pepp19.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Testing Models of Distributive Politics using Exit Polls to Measure Voters’ Preferences and Partisanship (2013)
Working Paper: Testing Models of Distributive Politics using Exit Polls to Measure Voters Preferences and Partisanship (2009)
Working Paper: Testing models of distributive politics using exit polls to measure voter preferences and partisanship (2006)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cep:stipep:19

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