Strategic Delegation in a Legislative Bargaining Model with Pork and Public

This paper examines the incentives of voters to appoint legislators with different preferences from their own. The paper adopts an underlying legislative bargaining model proposed by Volden & Wiseman (2007) in which legislators with heterogeneous preferences divide a fixed budget between a public good and pork projects (local public goods). In this framework it asks under what conditions strategic delegation, that is voting for a representative with different preferences from one’s own, is optimal. We show that voters have an incentive to strategically delegate to affect how the budget is divided at the legislative level. Contrary to the existing literature, the incentives for strategic delegation exist to direct more money to the public good and not to pork projects when the preference for pork among districts who prefer it to the public good is not too strong. This results in at least as many representatives that favor the public good as districts that favor the public good. The paper also shows that the positive externalities associated with increased public goods contributions increase expected social welfare. An extension to the case of more than one representative per district is considered. ∗I am extremely grateful to Massimo Morelli who planted the seed for this project and, alon