We discuss circumstances whereby presidents dispense distributive benefits to enhance their reelection chances and cultivate congressional support. Presidents do this by influencing bureaucratic decision making within those subsystems to strategically time federal project announcements to coincide with presidential and congressional elections. We test these conten tions and find support for them. We conclude that the traditional theory of distributive politics is not so much invalid as incomplete. Our findings show that presidents can play more strategic roles within the distributive policy arena than existing theory suggests.
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