Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: Intra-Party Bargaining, Electoral Rules, and Distributive Politics in Parliamentary Democracies

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This project seeks funding to explain two types of variation in distributive policies in the parliamentary democracies. The first concerns the balance in the aggregate spending between the public goods type policies that benefit a broader citizen base, and the particularistic, pork-barrel type policies that target narrow segments of the society. What explains the cross-country variation in the aggregate spending balance between the public goods and the particularistic programs under parliamentary democracies? The second type of variation is how distributive programs are allocated across electoral districts, the primary bases of political representation in most democracies. Are any cross-country differences expected in the pattern of geographical allocation of distributive programs? If so, what accounts for these differences? On the balance between public goods and particularistic programs, popular accounts in the literature focus on the difference in electoral rules as a key explanatory variable. However, while the difference in electoral rules may be among the most important factors, it should be yet the only one of many factors that shape incentives of the legislators. The exclusive focus on the difference in electoral rules might have missed important variations in their incentives. On the allocation of distributive programs across electoral districts, the existing literature lacks in the specific predictions of the cross-country difference in the pattern of allocation across districts. To overcome these limitations, this project proposes a theoretical account focusing on so far a neglected aspect of the story, intra-party bargaining between party leaders and backbench legislators of the governing party(ies) in parliamentary democracies. On the aggregate balance between public goods and distributive programs, this theory predicts that the allocation of budget to public goods (particularistic programs) increases if the electoral fate of incumbent legislators of the governing party(ies) is more (less) cohesive with the fate of their party as a whole. One of the major innovations of this paper is the estimation of the cohesion of the electoral fate of incumbents from government parties across different electoral systems and the use of it as a key explanatory variable to test the hypothesis with the time-series-cross-section data of about twenty advanced industrial democracies. On the allocation of distributive programs across districts, the same theory predicts that marginal districts receive more distributive programs under the electoral systems without intra-party electoral competition at district level while districts withpowerful/senior legislators receive more distributive programs under the electoral systems with intra-party competition. This hypothesis is tested with a data from Japan which has experienced the change of electoral systems from those with intra-party competition to those without.Through these theoretical and empirical investigations, this project contributes to a betterunderstanding of distributive politics under the parliamentary democracy, a predominant form of democracy among advanced industrial societies and a popular option among young democracies.