Legislators have the potential for credit claiming from agency spending in a congressional district only when the awarded contracts or grants are sufficiently large to be noticed or appreciated. Therefore, unlike previous research on distributive politics, we examine the allocation of contracts considering the size of the contracts, not just the overall spending or the numbers of contracts per congressional district. We use a difference-in-difference analysis to evaluate how agencies altered their allocations of contracts in response to the 2006 congressional elections, in which partisan control of the Congress changed to the Democrats. We find that federal agencies responded to the election by allocating larger contracts to Democratic districts. In addition, we find that agencies whose programs received lower scores on the Bush administration’s Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART) allocated larger contracts to Democratic than Republican districts than did agencies whose programs received higher PART ratings.
ArnoldD. (1979). Congress and the bureaucracy: A theory of influence. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
2.
ArnoldD. (1990). The logic of congressional action. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
3.
BanksJ.WeingastB. (1992). The political control of bureaucracies under asymmetric information. American Journal of Political Science, 36, 509-524.
4.
BerryC. R.BurdenB. C.HowellW. G. (2010). The president and the distribution of federal spending. American Political Science Review, 104, 783-799.
5.
BerryC. R.GersenJ. E. (2010, May18). Agency spending and political control of the bureaucracy. Paper presented at the Political Economy Seminar, Stanford University, CA.
6.
BertelliA. M.GroseC. R. (2009). Secretaries of pork? A new theory of distributive public policy. The Journal of Politics, 71, 926-945.
7.
BickersK. N.EvansD.SteinR. M.WrinkleR. D. (2007, August 30-September 2). The electoral effect of credit claiming for pork barrel projects in Congress. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago, IL.
8.
BickersK. N.SteinR. M. (1996). The electoral dynamics of the federal pork barrel. American Journal of Political Science, 40, 1300-1326.
9.
BoyckoM.ShleiferA.VishnyR. (1996). A theory of privatization. The Economic Journal, 106, 309-319.
10.
BrownT. L.PotoskiM. (2003a). Managing contract performance: A transaction costs approach. Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 22, 275-297.
11.
BrownT. L.PotoskiM. (2003b). Transaction costs and institutional explanations for government service production decisions. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 13, 441-468.
12.
BrownT. L.PotoskiM.Van SlykeD. M. (2006). Managing public service contracts: Aligning values, institutions, and markets. Public Administration Review, 66, 323-331.
13.
CareyJ. M.ShugartM. S. (1994). Incentives to cultivate a personal vote: A rank ordering of electoral formulas. Electoral Studies, 14, 417-439.
14.
CarseyT. M.RundquistB. (1999). Party and committee in distributive politics: Evidence from defense spending source. The Journal of Politics, 61, 1156-1169.
15.
ClintonJ. D.LewisD. E. (2008). Expert opinion, agency characteristics, and agency preferences. Political Analysis, 16, 3-20.
16.
DeHoogR. H. (1990). Competition, negotiation, or cooperation: Three models for service contracting. Administration & Society, 22, 317-340.
17.
DullM. (2006). Why PART? The institutional politics of presidential budget reform. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 16, 187-215.
18.
FennoR. (1973). Congressmen in committees. Boston, MA: Little, Brown.
19.
FredericksonD. G.FredericksonH. G. (2007). Measuring the performance of the hollow state. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.
20.
GarrettT. A.SobelR. S. (2003). The political economy of FEMA disaster payments. Economic Inquiry, 41, 496-509.
21.
GilmourJ. B. (2007). Implementing OMB’s Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART): Meeting the challenges of integrating budget and performance. OECD Journal on Budgeting, 7, 1-40.
22.
GilmourJ. B.LewisD. E. (2006a). Assessing performance budgeting at OMB: The influence of politics, performance, and program size. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 16, 169-186.
23.
GilmourJ. B.LewisD. E. (2006b). Does performance budgeting work? An examination of the Office of Management and Budget’s PART scores. Public Administration Review, 66, 742-752.
24.
GlobermanS.ViningA. R. (1996). A framework for evaluating the government contracting-out decision with an application to information technology. Public Administration Review, 56, 577-584.
25.
GordonS. C. (2011). Politicizing agency spending authority: Lessons from a Bush-era scandal. American Political Science Review, 105, 717-734.
26.
HeinrichC. J. (2012). How credible is the evidence, and does it matter? An analysis of the program assessment rating tool. Public Administration Review, 72, 123-134.
27.
HudakJ. (2014). Presidential pork: White House influence over the distribution of federal grants. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.
28.
JoyceP. G. (2011). The Obama administration and PBB: Building on the legacy of federal performance-informed budgeting?Public Administration Review, 71, 356-367.
29.
KasdinS. R. (2010). Reinventing reforms: How to improve program management using performance measures really. Public Budgeting & Finance, 30(3), 51-78.
30.
KasdinS. R.LinL. (2015). Strategic behavior by federal agencies in the allocation of public resources. Public Choice, 164, 309-329.
31.
KatzR. S. (1986). Intraparty preference voting. In GrofmanB.LijphartA. (Eds.), Electoral laws and their political consequences (pp. 85-103). New York, NY: Agathon Press.
32.
KettlD. (1993). Sharing power: Public governance and private markets. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.
33.
KrauseG. A. (1999). A two-way street: The institutional dynamics of the modern administrative state. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
34.
LavertuS.LewisD. E.MoynihanD. (2013). Government reform, political ideology, and administrative burden: The case of performance management in the Bush administration. Public Administration Review, 73, 845-857.
35.
LevinJ.TadelisS. (2010). Contracting for government services: Theory and evidence from U.S. cities. The Journal of Industrial Economics, LVIII, 507-541.
LowryR. C.PotoskiM. (2004). Organized interests and the politics of federal discretionary grants. The Journal of Politics, 66, 513-533.
38.
LuJ. (2013). How political are government contracting decisions? An examination of human service contracting determinants. Public Administration Quarterly, 37, 183-209.
39.
MayerK. R. (1995). Electoral cycles in federal government Prime contract awards: State-level evidence from the 1988 and 1992 presidential elections. American Journal of Political Science, 39, 162-185.
40.
MayhewD. R. (1974). Congress: The electoral connection. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
41.
McCartyN. M. (2000). Presidential pork: Executive veto power and distributive politics. American Political Science Review, 94, 117-128.
42.
MoeT. M. (1984). The new economics of organization. American Journal of Political Science, 28, 739-777.
43.
MullenP. R. (2006). Performance-based budgeting: The contribution of the program assessment rating tool. Public Budgeting & Finance, 26(4), 79-88.
44.
NiskanenW. A.Jr. (1994). Bureaucracy and public economics. Brookfield, VT: Edward Elgar.
RadinB. A. (2006). Challenging the performance movement: Accountability, complexity, and democratic values. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.
47.
RundquistB. S.CarseyT. M. (2002). Congress and defense spending: The distributive politics of military procurement. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
48.
SavasE. S. (2000). Privatization and public-private partnerships. New York, NY: Seven Bridges Press.
49.
SavasE. S. (2002). Competition and choice in New York City social services. Public Administration Review, 62, 82-91.
50.
ShepsleK. A.WeingastB. R. (1984). Legislative politics and budget outcomes. In MillsG. B.PalmerJ. L. (Eds.), Federal budget policy in the 1980s (pp. 343-357). Washington, DC: Urban Institute.
51.
SteinR. M.BickersK. N. (1995). Perpetuating the pork barrel: Policy subsystems and American democracy. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
52.
WilliamsonO. E. (1981). The economics of organization: The transaction cost approach. The American Journal of Sociology, 87, 548-577.
53.
WilliamsonO. E. (1985). The economic institutions of capitalism: Firms, markets, relational contracting. New York, NY: Free Press.
54.
WilliamsonO. E. (1999). Public and private bureaucracies: A transaction cost economics perspective. The Journal of Law, Economics, & Organization, 15, 306-342.
55.
WilsonJ. Q. (1973). Political organizations. New York, NY: Basic Books.
56.
YoungM.ReksulakM.ShughartW. F.II. (2001). The political economy of the IRS. Economics & Politics, 13, 201-220.
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
