Pork barrel politics, voter turnout, and inequality: An experimental study

Abstract

We experimentally study pork barrel politics in repeated two-candidate majoritarian elections with costly voting. Candidates form distinct supporter groups by favoring some voters in budget spending and ignoring others. Relative to compulsory voting, voluntary voting induces on average larger, more narrowly targeted favors and therefore more inequality among otherwise identical voters. Against our prediction, candidate participants tend to cultivate policy polarization by repeatedly favoring their exclusive supporters and avoiding those of the opponent. With compulsory voting, they tolerate some additional policy overlap for a separate subset of voters. Relating to theory, actual levels and patterns of voluntary turnout are well captured by quantal response equilibrium (QRE) for a noise parameter estimate external to our experiment. Importantly, and surprisingly, for reasonable assumption we find unique QRE solutions for our polity games, which include the policymaking stage and each of the many possible elections that can emerge from that stage.