Valentino Larcinese

Allocating the U.S. Federal Budget to the States: The Impact of the President

This paper provides new evidence on the determinants of the U.S. federal budget allocation to the states. Departing from the existing literature that gives prominence to Congress, we carry on an empirical investigation on the impact of presidents during the period 1982–2000. Our findings suggest that federal budget allocation is affected by presidential politics. States that heavily supported the incumbent president in past presidential elections tend to receive more funds, while marginal and swing states are not rewarded. Party affiliation also matters since states whose governor belong to the same party of the president receive more federal funds, while states opposing the presidents party in Congressional elections are penalized. These results show that presidents are engaged in tactical distribution of federal funds and also provide good evidence in support of partisan theories of budget allocation.

Why Do Small States Receive More Federal Money? U.S. Senate Representation and the Allocation of Federal Budget

In this paper we provide new evidence on the importance of the so-called small state advantage for the allocation of the US federal budget. We also provide a new interpretation of the available empirical evidence. Analyzing outlays for the period 1978-2002, we show that not only does the population size of a state matter, but so too does its dynamics. Once population scale and change effects are separated, the impact of population size is substantially reduced, and population change turns out to be an important explanatory variable of current spending patterns. The impact of scale and change effects varies substantially across spending programs. Small states enjoy an advantage in defense spending, whereas fast growing ones are penalized in grants allocations. Our results imply that the interests of the states are not easily aligned around their population size alone. The distortion associated with population dynamics is concentrated on federal grants where formulas play a substantial role in limiting budgetary adjustments. Hence, a large part of the inverse relationship between spending and population appears to be driven by mechanisms of budgetary inertia which are compatible with incrementalist theories of budget allocation.

Information Acquisition, Ideology and Turnout: Theory and Evidence from Britain

The amount of political information that voters decide to acquire during an electoral campaign depends, among other things, on prior ideological beliefs about parties and/or candidates. Voters that are ex ante indifferent about the candidates attach little value to information because they perceive that voting itself will have little value. Voters that are ex ante very ideological also attach little value to information because they think that the news will hardly change their opinion. Thus, high incentives to be informed can be found at intermediate levels of partisanship. Moreover, the impact of increased political knowledge on turnout is asymmetric: new information increases the probability of voting of indifferent voters but decreases that of very ideological voters. These results are derived within a decision theoretical model of information acquisition and turnout that combines the Riker—Ordeshook (1968) approach to voting behaviour with the Becker (1965) approach to personal production functions. These predictions are then tested on survey data from the 1997 British Election Study (Heath et al., 1999). Our empirical findings are compatible with all the results of the theoretical exercise.

Voting over Redistribution and the Size of the Welfare State: The Role of Turnout

Theories of redistribution inspired by the Downsian model receive little support from empirical investigation. In this article I argue that one of the possible explanations is that the standard Downsian theory, and the empirical specifications derived from it, ignore electoral turnout. Empirical evidence consistently shows that higher-income citizens are more likely to vote; office-seeking candidates should therefore include this probability in their objective function. As a consequence, the pivotal voter is not the median in the income distribution, but is generally richer. Moreover, an increase in income inequality does not unambiguously increase the political demand for redistribution, as most literature takes for granted. Including turnout in the model restores the compatibility of the Downsian theory with current empirical evidence. A regression analysis on panel data for 41 countries in the period 1972–98 confirms the importance of turnout as an explanatory variable for social spending.

The Instrumental Voter Goes To the Newsagent Demand for Information, Marginality and the Media

This article studies the impact of instrumental voting on information demand and mass media behaviour during electoral campaigns. If voters act instrumentally then information demand should increase with the closeness of an election. If mass media are profit-maximizing firms then information supply should be larger in electoral constituencies where the contest is expected to be closer, delivery costs are lower and customers are on average more profitable for advertisers. The impact of the size of the electorate is theoretically undetermined. These conclusions are derived within a formal model of information demand and supply, and then tested, with good results, on data from the 1997 general election in Britain.

Electoral Competition and Redistribution with Rationally Informed Voters

Abstract In spite of the negligible probability that everyone has to cast a decisive vote, political information can be relevant for a number of private decisions. Under quite mild assumptions, the demand for information is increasing in income. Being informed affects responsiveness to electoral platforms and vote-seeking political parties should take this into account in their optimization process. As a consequence, redistribution is generally lower than what the median voter theorem predicts. Moreover, in contrast with what most literature takes for granted, an increase in inequality does not unambiguously increase redistribution. This is consistent with most empirical research in this field. Finally, an increase in the cost of information induces a reduction in redistribution.

A Better Life for All? Democratization and Electrification in Post-Apartheid South Africa

Does democracy affect basic service delivery? If yes, who benefits, and which elements of democracy matter—enfranchisement, the liberalization of political organization, or both? In 1994, 19 million South Africans gained the right to vote. The previously banned African National Congress was elected promising “a better life for all.” Using a difference-in-differences approach, we exploit heterogeneity in the share of newly enfranchised voters across municipalities to evaluate how franchise extension affected household electrification. Our unique data set combines night-light satellite imagery, geo-referenced census data, and municipal election results from the 1990s. We include covariates, run placebo regressions, and examine contiguous census tracts. We find that enfranchisement increased electrification. In parts of the country where municipalities lacked distribution capacity, the national electricity company prioritized core constituencies of the ANC. The effect of democratization on basic services depends on the national government’s ability to influence distribution at the local level.

The Channeled Italian Voters

This paper examines the ITANES survey data of the 2001 election and tries to evaluate the impact of televisions on the voting decisions of Italian voters. Voters that choose the expose themselves predominantly to news programmes from Mediaset are much more prone to vote for the centre-right coalition and voters that are exposed to RAI news are equally likely to vote for the centre-left coalition. By using a number of controls and instrumental variables to mitigate the problem of spurious correlation, we conclude that the main variables driving this polarization are linked to the voters’ evaluation of the leaders. When voters’ opinions on policy issues and leaders are introduced in the regressions the residual effect of television exposure appears small and often insignificant. The main beneficiary of this unexplained effect appears to be Forza Italia. However, to fully evaluate the effect of the exposure to media, future research will need to understand to which extent voters’ opinions on leaders and issues have been influenced by the mass media. This is an issue that cannot be addressed with the data currently available.

Singing from the Same Broad Sheet? Examining Newspaper Coverage Bias during the 2009 MPs’ Expenses Scandal

To see whether UK media coverage during the MPs’ expenses scandal followed partisan newspaper orientations, we analysed reporting from: a set of right-leaning (Daily Mail, The Times and Daily Telegraph) and left-leaning (The Guardian, The Independent) papers; the most widely read daily (The Sun); and a regional newspaper (The Scotsman). We found that, ceteris paribus, MPs received higher levels of coverage across all newspapers if they were on the front bench for one of the three major parties, misappropriated higher sums of money, received more media coverage before the scandal, or were female. However, there were no significant partisan differences between the newspapers under study. Thus, newspapers acted as watchdogs rather than in a partisan fashion during the expenses scandal.