Beyond borders: how spatial spillover effects shape the role of pork barrel politics on subnational policy provision?

To what extent do the effects of pork barrel funds in public policy spillover? Distributive politics are known to grease the wheels of politics in many ways, being crucial for building support in the Congress and among the electorate. Despite being considered an inefficient expense that is prone to corruption and clientelism, it can affect the electorate’s daily life as it positively affects public policy in the target jurisdictions. In this paper, I argue that spatial interdependence among local units and strategic allocation of pork monies draw an overflowing feature. Given the restriction on the amount of distributive funds available for allocation, representative target municipalities can absorb the demand of neighbouring areas and better process the benefit due to human and material resources. In other words, spatial spillover effects allow the collective effects of pork barrel politics to affect the neighbouring jurisdictions positively. Consequently increasing the pork’s beneficiary network. To test this claim, I leverage municipal-level information on pork barrel politics and public policy indicators. Using Brazil as a case, I gathered data on 55,346 impositional budgetary amendments and health indicators for 5,464 municipalities over four years. I apply the Spatial Durbin Model that accounts for the interdependence among local units and verifies both the direct and indirect effects in target units and their neighbouring municipalities, respectively. Preliminary results suggest that pork-barrel has a positive (albeit small) effect on health policy input, process, and outcome indicators, both in target cities and their neighbours.