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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?