Pork-Barrel Politics in
Postwar Italy, 1953-94
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Aim
Analysis of the political determinants of the distribution of
infrastructure expenditures by the Italian government to
the country’s 92 provinces between 1953-94.
In order to examine the different influence of ruling
parties, individual deputies and opposition parties in the
allocation of distributive goods to their electoral district.
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What is Pork-Barrel ?
The appropriation of government spending for
localized projects functional solely or primarily to
bring money to a representative district.
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The Italian context
• governed by Christian Democracy (DC) from the entire period
after World War II until 1993-94
• in the same period: Open-list PR electoral system
• standard expectation: DC distributes benefits to “core”
supporter(Italian South and North East) and then to four (later
five) parties coalition.
• even major opposition party (PCI) “share the spoils”
“consociationalism”
• unitary political structure: distributive politics centrally
controlled
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The Italian context: Distributive Politics in
previous research
• Marzotto and Schachter (1983): whether electoral
competition (DC-PCI) influenced the distribution of
investments by Cassa per il Mezzogiorno (1950-1970)
• Sapienza (2004): lower interest rates to firm in areas where
the political party controlling the bank is strong
• Mershon (2001): ministerial positions allocated in function of
their strenght within the party (factional nature of DC)
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Formal Theories of Distributive Politics
• Cox and McCubbins: benefits going to “core” supporters
• Lindbeck and Weibull/Dixit and Londregan: benefit going
to “swing voters” and/or low income voters
• McGillivray reconciles the two competing models using
two variables:
1) the type of electoral system
2) the strength of national political parties
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Distributive Politics under open-list PR
if the party list votes are sufficient for party A to win 3
seats in multimember district y, two cases:
1) the winning candidates are the three receiving most
individual preferences (open-list)
2) the winning candidates are the three candidates the
party leadership has placed at the top of the list
(closed-list)
Open list reduces party control over candidate selection
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Distributive Politics under open-list PR
Two possible influences on the discretionary allocation:
1) Individual deputies
2) the strength of ruling parties
They seek reelection cultivating
votes in their bailiwicks.
Parties seeking more votes
cultivate areas of support
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Hypotheses
INV: the amount of money spent in new public works
construction in province(or electoral district) i at time t (year of
the legislative period)
INFL: political influence exercised by national legislative
representatives over public works expenditures.
GOV: the strength of the governing of the governing party(-ies)
PROV: socioeconomic characteristics of the province or
electoral district.
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Data and Methods
PREF: number of individual votes received
SEN: seniority
SEX: male/female (dummy variable)
PARTYOFF: influence within the party
MINUNDER: minister or undersecretary (dummy variable)
GOVDEPS: governing parties’ deputies in electoral district
SHARE: of votes received
DM: district magnitude
PCIDEPS: number of deputies elected to the major opposition party
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Data and Methods
• public works expenditures: official data collected by Italy’s national
statistics office(ISTAT)
• elected deputies: Verzichelli-Cotta dataset which includes
information on the sex, educational attainments, party and
professional backgrounds merged with Golden dataset containing
the number of preferences received.
• aggregation of the characteristics of the deputies to the electoral
district level
• governing parties as parties in government at least half of the life of
legislative period
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Data and Methods: the estimation strategy
• lagged dependent variable as a regressor
• fixed effect estimator: absorbs all variables that are fixed
in time (e.g. the geographic unit)
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Data and Methods: the estimation strategy
• two fixed regressors as dependent variable:
1) annual average infrastructure investments
2) average spending on roads and airports
• DM and PCIDEPS to evaluate the impact of opposition
parties on investment
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Effect of opposition parties on investments
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Results
• when districts elect more powerful individuals off the
lists of governing parties they secure more infrastructure
investments
• when parties government receive larger (lower) vote
share, they secure less (more) resources to the electoral
district
• opposition parties: more representative, fewer resources
(failure of “consociational” argument ?)
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Robustness analysis
• Does the results hinge on the choice of proxy variables?
• How about the estimations strategy?
• The use of alternative measures and different estimation
strategies does not affect the final results
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Conclusions
• How general are these results?
same patterns in countries with factionalized and lack of
central control (Brazil, Sri Lanka, Panama, Eastern European transition nations)
• How did Italian provinces and electoral district receive higher
allocation of investments?
(modeling strategy: change over time not across space)
• How do these results speak to the “core” vs. “swing” debate?
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