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Pork-Barrel Politics in Postwar Italy, 1953-94

Pork-Barrel Politics in Postwar Italy, 1953-94. 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.

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Pork-Barrel Politics in Postwar Italy, 1953-94

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  1. Pork-Barrel Politics in Postwar Italy, 1953-94

  2. 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.

  3. What is Pork-Barrel ? The appropriation of government spending for localized projects functional solely or primarily to bring money to a representative district.

  4. 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

  5. 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 ilMezzogiorno(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)

  6. 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

  7. 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: • the winning candidates are the three receiving most individual preferences (open-list) • 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

  8. Distributive Politics under open-list PR Two possible influences on the discretionary allocation:

  9. Hypotheses INV: the amount of money spent in new public works construction in province(or electoral district) iat 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.

  10. 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

  11. 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

  12. 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)

  13. 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

  14. Effect of opposition parties on investments

  15. 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 ?)

  16. 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

  17. 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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