Government Spending

GOVERNMENT SPENDING IS an important issue in every campaign. Opinions on the appropriate amount of spending by the federal government are heavily determined by one's ideological identification. Modern liberalism, which developed under Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, marked a sharp change in the philosophical rationale and practical implications of government intervention into the economy. Under the New Deal, the federal government left behind the tenets of laissez-faire economic policy and mandated the vast expansion of government intervention into the economy. Programmatic expansion, it was argued, was necessary for the government to defend American traditions of democracy and equality. Modern conservatism began its development in the 1950s, largely in response to the growth of government under liberal New Deal policies. Modern conservatism seeks a return to classical liberal economic policies that emphasize minimal government involvement.

In this sense, government spending becomes part of a range of issues on which candidates take ideological positions to win over voters. Candidates can also use advocating increasing or cutting spending on specific issues to solidify support from their political bases. Republicans tend to emphasize decreased spending, especially on government programs that would typically be considered entitlement spending. Pushing for a decrease in welfare spending during the 1994 campaigns is a good example. Democrats tend to focus on bolstering government programs, such as Social Security, with additional funding; they are highly critical of spending cuts.

The importance of government spending at the national level often changes with the nature of the federal budget. Many voters across ideological lines are, in fact, fiscally conservative. Conservative in the sense that [Page 285]few voters express preferences for increased government spending if it would mean increasing the size of the federal budget deficit. Thus, in election years when the deficit is an important issue, government spending also tends to increase in importance.

One of the primary advantages accruing to incumbents, particularly legislators, is the ability to secure funding for projects meant to benefit local constituencies. In a positive sense, these programs can be considered distributive or particularistic. They are meant to distribute some amount of the general revenue of government back to specific geographic units: districts and states. These programs, especially when discussed in the media or by political opponents to such spending, are also called pork barrel projects or earmarks.

There are definitional differences between distributive projects and pork, although the practical political differences are minimal. “Distributive benefits” tends to be a more inclusive phrase, referring to a wider variety of projects, but both reference federal spending that benefits targeted constituencies. Distributive spending has a strong positive effect on the electoral prospects of the incumbent. The bases for such expectations are derived from rational choice theory. Given a fixed amount of tax revenue for spending, voters prefer more spending in their localities than elsewhere. Thus, each legislator, in order to curry favor with constituents, seeks to maximize his or her district or state's share of the total amount spent on pork barrel projects. Most of the empirical research on distributive benefits reports a significant link between increases in distributive spending and increases in the vote share of the incumbent.

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