The President targets many kinds of LFEs to increase his reelection chances (or the election chances of his party's successor candidate). We find evidence of both voter-oriented and elite-induced targeting. Voter-oriented targeting occurs only for LFEs that are relatively low in institutional complexity. We argue that voters can much more readily trace such LFEs back to the President than they can LFEs that are institutionally very complex. With one exception (transfer payments), voters respond to changes in the targeted LFEs with sufficient strength and homogeneity to make targeting them a feasible and rewarding tactic for the President. But the elite-induced targeting pattern occurs for both not-so-complex and highly complex LFEs, including six of the eight kinds of intergovernmental transfers. Targeting in these cases follows the pre-midterm pattern to be expected if elites who are interested in returning benefits to their local areas in the form of LFEs are being appointed to the administration according to the converted-loss strategy.
Such a conclusion implies an important correction to work such as Arnold's
(1979) that has demonstrated how strongly members of Congress can influence
bureaucratic decisions regarding the geographic allocation of federal
expenditures. Any theory of influence that neglects the President's role in
determining geographic outcomes is incomplete.
But our results do not
necessarily contradict Arnold's analysis. The converted-loss appointments
strategy can maximize the effort locally interested elites exert on the
President's behalf, and pre-appointment screening can minimize the chances
that an appointee has policy goals at wide variance from the President's. But
a presidential candidate would gain electorally from using the converted-loss
strategy even if he or she were completely indifferent to the geographic
distribution of LFEs. Indeed, such indifference can attract effort in favor
of the candidate from the widest range of local elites, if local elites can
reasonably expect to encounter minimal screening of their geographic
preferences. In this case the President would be largely uninvolved in the
post-election efforts to target spending, and spending outcomes would be
determined through interactions between the bureaucracy and Congress. Even in
this case, however, bureaucratic appointees' preferences would be shaped by
the processes that selected them, so that the interactions with Congress would
be strongly affected by the geographic distribution of electoral support for
the President.
It is reasonable to speak of presidential pork barrel politics. We have not emphasized some things that have received a lot of attention in discussions of pork barrel politics in Congress, most notably the role of organized interests and the potential importance of logrolling (Ferejohn 1974; Shepsle and Weingast 1981; Stein and Bickers n.d.). We assume that organized interests are important in many ways in interactions between the President and local elites. Logrolling is not a concern as long as expenditures result from discretionary actions by appointed elites who act in isolation and without substantial constraints. But it becomes more important when officials or agencies must coordinate--with one another or with Congress--to produce expenditures, or when spending is subject to budget constraints. Nonetheless we wish to emphasize that presidential politics, like congressional politics, is substantially local.