Political ambition and subnational redistributive spending

Abstract

Abstract: Government spending is a powerful tool subnational incumbents can utilise to favour different social groups in a federation. As such, it spreads out redistributive conflicts over who gets what (and how) in multi-level democracies. Schematically, subnational governments can either benefit specific groups by allocating public resources to particularistic goods or they can favour a large majority of citizens by delivering collective goods. In this chapter, we analyse the institutional, contextual, and individual-level factors that affect subnational governments’ redistributive spending choices. In contrast to prior research that has concentrated on both institutional and contextual determinants of government spending, we emphasise that individual factors largely explain why subnational incumbents decide to reward certain groups of citizens over others thus shaping redistributive conflicts within their territorial jurisdictions. Our central claim is that subnational executives’ (i.e., state governors) office ambitions – whether they are national-centred or state-centred – affect their decisions to strategically allocate social infrastructure (collective) and civil administration (particularistic) expenditures by delineating different electoral linkages between politicians and citizens. More concretely, governors who seek to remain in their districts will favour their core supporters and invest in patronage-based networks of political support by distributing targeted particularistic goods. On the contrary, governors who aspire to gain popularity beyond their districts in order to build a national career will target larger constituencies by providing collective goods, which are broader in scope and more visible.