Legislatures, Bureaucracies and Distributive Spending∗

This paper develops a theory of bureaucratic influence on distributive politics. While there exists a rich literature on the effects of institutions such as presidents, electoral systems, and bicameralism on government spending, the role of professional bureaucrats has yet to receive formal scrutiny. In the model, legislators bargain over the allocation of distributive benefits across districts. The legislature may either “politicize” a program by bargaining directly over pork and bypassing bureaucratic scrutiny, or “professionalize” it by letting a bureaucrat approve or reject project funding in each district according to an underlying quality standard. The model predicts that the legislature will professionalize when the expected program quality is high. However, politicization becomes more likely as the number of high quality projects increases, and under divided government. Further, more competent bureaucrats can encourage politicization if the expected program quality is low. Finally, politicized programs are larger than professionalized programs. ∗I thank Chris Berry, John de Figueiredo, Alexandre Debs, Justin Fox, Sean Gailmard, Stu Jordan, Tasos Kalandrakis, Michael Peress, Alan Wiseman, seminar participants at the University of Rochester and Yale University, and panel participants at the 2009 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, 2010 UC Merced Conference on the Politics of Federal Spending and 2011 Emory Conference on Institutions and Law Making for helpful comments. †Political Science Department, 420 W 118th St., New York NY 10027 ([email protected]).