Abstract:

Co-partisan legislators, and governors in control of state government, often direct public funds for projects and programs toward localities where their party attains high levels of electoral support. While we typically equate distributive goods with concrete projects, state-level financing formulae may also be subject to partisan manipulation. School finance reform, which often arises in response to court cases heard in a state’s supreme court, may provide just such an opportunity for manipulation. Using panel regression methods, this study shows that in the wake of judicial interventions that occurred in many U.S. states since the 1970s, transfers from states to local areas for the purposes of education were geographically targeted to co-partisan localities when one party controlled state government, in the period immediately following reform. The findings have important consequences for our understanding of how distributive politics occurs, and what types of goods it may target.

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