Local Favoritism in At-large Proportional Representation Systems

Jon Fiva and Askill Halse

No 5534, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: Pork barrel spending is typically attributed to the strategic behavior of political elites hoping to be electorally rewarded by voters residing in their districts. Such behavior is expected to depend on the incentives imposed by the electoral system. We estimate the causal effect of local representation in a closed list proportional representation system where individual candidates have no clear electoral incentive to favor their hometown. Using data from Norwegian regional governments, we still find a hometown bias. We document that municipalities with a representative on the regional council from the same party as the governor tend to obtain more funding for local investments. In an extension we show that citizens also tend to vote more often for parties with a governor candidate from their own hometown, consistent with an expectation of particularistic benefits. Both effects are driven by municipalities with below median population size.

Keywords: distributive politics; voting behavior; regression discontinuity design (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 H72 H77 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

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Journal Article: Local favoritism in at-large proportional representation systems (2016)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_5534

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