Beyond borders: How spatial spillover effects shapes the role of pork barrel politics on subnational public policy provision
Distributive politics; Spatial spillover effects; Pork barrel collective effects; Multilevel
dynamics;
To what extent do the effects of pork barrel policies in public policy spill over? Pork barrel
greases the wheels of politics in many ways, being a crucial tool for building support in
Congress and with the electorate. Due to their discretionary nature, they are considered an
inefficient, poorly planned expense with a high possibility of generating corruption and creating
clientelistic networks. Despite its lousy reputation, Pork barrel policies influence the electorate’s
daily life as they positively affect public policy in the target jurisdiction, even with small
and dissipative effects. However, these effects could be underestimated as neither research
considers the spatial relationship among municipalities. I argue that pork barrel collective
effects are more prominent when considering spatial spillover effects, which permit them to
reach neighbouring jurisdictions. Spatial interdependence among local units and the strategic
allocation of pork monies draws this overflowing feature. The restriction on the amount of
pork barrel policies available for distribution forces politicians to target units that can better
absorb the demand of neighbouring areas and better process the benefit due to the accumulation
of human and material resources. Consequently, spatial spillover effects increase
the pork’s beneficiary network, helping to soften its inefficiency and becoming politically efficient
despite increasing subnational unevenness in policy provision. I use Brazil as a case to
test this argument, as they have the proxy for pork barrelling, have good quality subnationallevel
data information available and provide 5,570 municipalities allowing the understanding
of heterogeneous effects under the same institutional incentives and electoral features. To
test this claim, I leverage the municipal level in an original time-series cross-sectional dataset,
gathering data on 33,240 impositional budgetary amendments and health indicators for 5,214
municipalities between 2014 and 2018. I apply the Spatial Durbin Model that accounts for the
interdependence among local units and verifies both the direct and indirect effects in target
units and their neighbouring municipalities, respectively. The results show that legislators allocate
pork barrel resources following a well-defined strategy: concentrating the highest share
of pork barrel monies in a single municipality while benefiting its neighbours with lower values.
Furthermore, suggest that pork barrel has a positive (albeit small) effect on health policy
in the target municipality and neighbouring local units. Nonetheless, these effects are more
prominent when analysing policy input indicators (measured as annual spending per capita)
while losing their strength when analysed as policy process indicators, measured as BCG
vaccine coverage, and outcome indicators, measured through the infant mortality rate. Taken
together, these results contribute to understanding the effects of distributive policies on public
policies at the subnational level and how the territorial dynamics can extend the network of
beneficiaries and, ultimately, soothe the inefficiency of spending on the pork barrel policy.