Abstract
Politicians who care about the spoils of office may underprovide a public good because its benefits cannot be targeted to voters as easily as pork-barrel spending. We compare a winner-take-all system - where all the spoils go to the winner - to a proportional system - where the spoils of office are split among candidates proportionally to their share of the vote. In a winner-take-all system the public good is provided less often than in a proportional system when the public good is particularly desirable. We then consider the electoral college system and show that it is particularly subject to this inefficiency.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 225-239 |
Number of pages | 15 |
Journal | American Economic Review |
Volume | 91 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Mar 2001 |
All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes
- Economics and Econometrics