Political Manipulation in a Majoritarian Democracy: Central Government Targeting of Public Funds to English Subnational Government, in Space and across Time

Abstract

This article argues that it is rational for the executive to target resources in space and through time if it seeks to maximise its chances of electoral success. In majoritarian democracies such as the United Kingdom, there are particularly strong incentives to target resources to marginal legislative constituencies, although similar opportunies exist in other political systems. The benefits of such a practice could be growing, because the costs of forms of temporal targeting predicted by theories of the political business cycle have increased, owing to the effect of the global economy. In the United Kingdom one channel through which resources can be targeted is central grants to local authorities. This model is tested with pooled cross section data on the central finance of English local government between 1981/1982–1995/1996. The article confirms that central government spatially targeted marginals after 1988/1989 while it continued to allocate greater funds near national elections, conditional on its opinion poll ratings. Hypotheses from the literature on distributional politics are also tested, finding evidence for the temporal allocation of resources to win local elections.