1 Pork-Barrel Politics in Postwar Italy,

2 Aim Analysis of the political determinants of the distribution of infrastructure expenditures by the Italian government to the country’s 92 provinces between 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 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 il Mezzogiorno ( ) 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: 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

8 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

9 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.

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

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15 Effect of opposition parties on investments

16 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 ?)

17 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

18 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?