Distributive Politics Analysis

Distributive politics analysis studies how governments allocate divisible public spending — grants, transfers, projects, and pork — across districts and groups to maximize electoral support. Two competing theories anchor the field. The swing-voter logic, formalized by Avinash Dixit and John Londregan in 1996 (building on Lindbeck and Weibull), holds that parties target marginal districts where votes are most responsive to spending. The core-voter logic, associated with Gary Cox and Mathew McCubbins's 1986 redistributive-game model, holds that parties instead reward loyal supporters whose preferences and reliability they know best. The empirical method is a regression of observed transfers on electoral characteristics — district marginality and partisan alignment — to test which targeting strategy the data reveal.