Who Eats the Most?: Quantitative Analysis of Pork Barrel

IDE Discussion Papers are preliminary materials circulated to stimulate discussions and critical comments Since a pork barrel is crucial in buying off voters, competition over the distributions among legislators has been considered as one of the main factors in producing congressional political dynamism and congressional institutions. This paper aims to test the theory of pork barrel distributions in the Philippines through OLS regression on the quantitative data of the 12th congress. The results show that some attributes of legislators are statistically significant in estimating pork barrel allocations, but, do not support the hypothesis that the legislators ’ proximity to leaders is a determining factor in the distributions