Do Small States Get More Federal Monies?Myth and Reality About the US SenateMalapportionment

Abstract

We analyze the relationship between senate malapportionment and the allocation ofthe US federal budget to the states during the period 1978-2002. A substantialliterature originating from the influential paper by ?) finds that small andoverrepresented states get significantly larger shares of federal funds. We show thatthese studies suffer from fundamental identification problems and grosslyoverestimate the impact of malapportionment. Most of the estimated impact is not ascale but a change effect. Rather than evidence of "small state advantage", we findthat states with fast growing population are penalized in the allocation of the federalbudget independently of whether they are large or small.federal budget, malapportionment, small state advantage,overrepresentation