The Whole is More Than the Sum of its Parts: Measuring Effects of Pork Barrel Politics on Local Elections

In recent decades scholars have focused on pork barrel politics and its features. Despite rising amount of literature in this field, our understanding of consequences of public money distribution on elections is still underdeveloped especially in respect to local politics. The main question remains which distribution strategies help the incumbents when seeking reelection and similarly which strategies are less effective in this regard. In this paper I examine three national distribution programs and their effect on mayoral elections in Slovakia. Using multilevel models, I analyze four local elections from 2006 to 2018 with a total of more than seven thousand competitive rallies. The results show that mayors have higher odds of reelection when their municipalities receive more grants or when they receive the grants closer to the end of the term and thus shortly before the actual election. These effects are even enhanced when resources of all three national distribution programs are analyzed together and not as separate entities. The paper thus shows that analysis of effectiveness of vote buying mechanisms requires both attention to specific conditions of money allocation as well as a more general scope covering more distribution programs at once.