REELECTION AND CONGRESSIONAL SUPPORT Presidential Motives in Distributive Politics

Abstract

We discuss circumstances whereby presidents dispense distributive benefits to enhance their reelection chances and cultivate congressional support. Presidents do this by influencing bureaucratic decision making within those subsystems to strategically time federal project announcements to coincide with presidential and congressional elections. We test these conten-tions and find support for them. We conclude that the traditional theory of distributive politics is not so much invalid as incomplete. Our findings show that presidents can play more strategic roles within the distributive policy arena than existing theory suggests. Our understanding of distributive policies and the politics that forge those policies has increased in recent years.1 Distributive poli-cies are policies in which administrators can divide program benefits among many congressional districts. Distributive politics tends to be universalistic because bureaucrats implement benefits discretely within localities throughout the nation. Local politicians may then take credit for them. Strategically situated legislators, bureaucrats, and supportive interest groups compose the policy-making core of these subsystems. Theoretical frameworks of distributive policy making commonly describe these subsystems with insular terms such as &dquo;iron triangles,&dquo; and most formulations of these theories exclude the presi-dent. (General theoretical statements are found in Ripley and Franklin [1991] and Lowi [1964]. Specific tests include Anagnoson [1980, 1982, 1983], Arnold [1979], Ferejohn [1974], Ray [1980], Ric