Peer-reviewed article · 2023
When Legislators Don't Bring Home the Pork: The Case of Philippine Senators
Nico Ravanilla and Allen Hicken · Political Science Research & Methods 11(4): 785-803
In brief
Why Philippine senators, elected nationwide, do not funnel pork barrel spending to local strongholds the way district politicians do, and what that reveals about electoral rules and targeted spending.
Abstract
Research in legislative politics suggests that the desire to get reelected encourages legislators to “bring home the pork” by delivering electorally rewarding, targeted spending. This is particularly true where the electoral system encourages incumbents to cultivate a personal vote. We analyze how Philippine Senators spend their Constituency Development Fund (CDF) and using the staggered elections to identify variation in reelection status, we show that senatorial reelectionists do not always bring home the pork. Because Philippine Senators are elected by plurality-at-large voting by the national electorate, they tend to spend their CDF allotments closer to elections but avoid allocating them disproportionately to their local strongholds. These findings illustrate how electoral rules can deter targeted spending but lead legislators to find alternative ways to build a personal vote.
Research annotationQuestion, variables, design, findings, and mechanism at a glance▾
- Research question
- Do legislators facing reelection use pork to build a personal vote by targeting narrow local constituencies, and what happens when the electoral rule makes such targeting electorally costly?
- Independent variable (X)
- Reelection incentives, identified from the Philippine Senate's staggered elections, under a plurality-at-large rule with a single national constituency.
- Dependent variable (Y)
- Four measures built from a senator's annual Constituency Development Fund allocation: pork utilization, the share of the allocation actually released; the ratio of targeted to total releases, where releases to local government units count as targeted and releases to national agencies as non-targeted; the share of targeted releases going to the senator's home province; and a concentration index of targeted releases across subnational constituencies.
- Identification strategy
- Ordinary least squares on a panel of 160 senator-year observations spanning four electoral cycles from 2001 to 2012, regressing each outcome on an indicator for whether the senator is up for reelection in the next senatorial race, with year fixed effects, controls for gender, years in office, leadership post, celebrity status, and term-ender status, and robust standard errors clustered at the senator level. The exogeneity claim rests on constitutional design: all 24 senators serve six-year terms with half elected every three years, so reelection status differs across senators observed in the same year. Because all senators share one national constituency and receive equal appropriations of 200 million pesos per year by law, reelectionists and non-reelectionists face the same electoral environment and the same budget, which rules out the selection and common-pool problems that afflict term-limit studies.
- Main findings
- Senators standing for reelection release 15 percentage points more of their annual allocation than senators not standing, and 12 points more once controls and year fixed effects are included. Against a mean utilization rate of 54 percent, that is a 22 percent increase. The effect is concentrated in the flexible discretionary component and is small and insignificant for the infrastructure component. Targeting moves the other way. The ratio of targeted to total releases falls by 9 percentage points, significant only at the 10 percent level and insignificant with covariates, and the concentration of targeted spending across constituencies does not change at all. For the most visible infrastructure spending, reelectionists cut the share going to their home province by 9 to 12 percentage points.
- Mechanism
- Because senators are elected by a single national electorate, geographically targeted pork is not merely useless to them, it is electorally costly: for every vote secured through targeted largess, a senator risks losing the votes of everyone left out. Their fixed budget cannot reach enough localities to assemble a national majority. Senators resolve the tradeoff by keeping the part of pork that signals ability, the visible release of funds, and dropping the part that plays favorites, channeling money to national agencies for programmatic spending and back-loading releases into the years they are on the ballot.
- Why it matters
- Shows that electoral rules can deter the geographic pork targeting usually treated as a universal feature of legislative behavior, and redirect rather than eliminate personal-vote seeking.
- Speaks to
- distributive politics and pork barrel spendingelectoral systems and the personal votelegislative behavior
Cite
@article{ravanilla2023pork,
title = {When Legislators Don't Bring Home the Pork: The Case of Philippine Senators},
author = {Nico Ravanilla and Allen Hicken},
journal = {Political Science Research & Methods},
year = {2023},
doi = {10.1017/psrm.2022.27},
}