TY - JOUR
T1 - A Tournament Theory of Pork Barrel Politics
T2 - The Case of Japan
AU - Catalinac, Amy
AU - Bueno de Mesquita, Bruce
AU - Smith, Alastair
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank David Kang, Saori Katada, Bryn Rosenfeld, Erin Baggott, Jonathan Markowitz, Benjamin Graham, Gabrielle Cheung, Dorothy Kronick, Hye Young You, Julia Payson, Yue Hou, Dawn Teele, Guy Grossman, Marc Meredith, Tulia Falleti, Jonathan Nagler, Kristin Vekasi, Daniel M. Smith, Naofumi Fujimura, Phillip Lipscy, Atsushi Tago, Neal Beck, Noam Lupu, Yosuke Sunahara, Ian McAllister, Yusaku Horiuchi, Gregory Noble, Steven Reed, Kuniaki Nemoto, Taishi Muraoka, Frances Rosenbluth, Keisuke Kawata, and Yuichiro Yoshida. We also thank participants of the 2017 American Political Science Association and Australian Society for Quantitative Political Science meetings, Kobe University’s School of Law, the Yale University Workshop on Japanese Politics and Diplomacy, Hiroshima University, and New York University’s Field Lunch in Comparative Politics for valuable discussion on earlier drafts, and Shiro Kuriwaki, Kuni Nemoto, Yusaku Horiuchi, Lucia Motolinia-Carballo, and Alessandro Vechiatto for help with data and analysis. The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2020.
PY - 2020/9/1
Y1 - 2020/9/1
N2 - How do politicians motivate voters to turn out and support them? We posit that incumbents construct tournaments between groups and distribute rewards to groups based on the levels of electoral support provided. We test our propositions in Japan, where incumbents can discern relative levels of support provided by municipalities in their districts and influence spending in ways that reward certain municipalities over others. Using new data on approximately 3,300+ Japanese municipalities in 1980 to 2000, we show that when municipalities are ranked according to their levels of support for Liberal Democratic Party winners in their district, those at higher ranks get larger rewards, the difference in size of the reward increases at higher ranks, and those in districts where municipalities vary more in size also receive larger rewards. Our findings support the theory and help explain other features of Japanese politics, including why pork tends to flow to relatively unsupportive districts.
AB - How do politicians motivate voters to turn out and support them? We posit that incumbents construct tournaments between groups and distribute rewards to groups based on the levels of electoral support provided. We test our propositions in Japan, where incumbents can discern relative levels of support provided by municipalities in their districts and influence spending in ways that reward certain municipalities over others. Using new data on approximately 3,300+ Japanese municipalities in 1980 to 2000, we show that when municipalities are ranked according to their levels of support for Liberal Democratic Party winners in their district, those at higher ranks get larger rewards, the difference in size of the reward increases at higher ranks, and those in districts where municipalities vary more in size also receive larger rewards. Our findings support the theory and help explain other features of Japanese politics, including why pork tends to flow to relatively unsupportive districts.
KW - Japan
KW - distributive politics
KW - fiscal transfers
KW - pork-barrel politics
KW - representation and electoral systems
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85078398938&partnerID=8YFLogxK
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U2 - 10.1177/0010414019897677
DO - 10.1177/0010414019897677
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85078398938
SN - 0010-4140
VL - 53
SP - 1619
EP - 1655
JO - Comparative Political Studies
JF - Comparative Political Studies
IS - 10-11
ER -