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Replication Data for: Partisan Procurement: Contracting with the United States Federal Government, 2003–2015

Harvard Dataverse (Africa Rice Center, Bioversity International, CCAFS, CIAT, IFPRI, IRRI and WorldFish)

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Title Replication Data for: Partisan Procurement: Contracting with the United States Federal Government, 2003–2015
 
Identifier https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/4NEPI7
 
Creator Dahlström, Carl
Fazekas, Mihály
Lewis, David E.
 
Publisher Harvard Dataverse
 
Description The U.S. federal government spends huge sums buying goods and services from outside of the public sector. Given the sums involved, strategic government purchasing can have electoral consequences. In this paper, we suggest that more politicized agencies show favoritism to businesses in key electoral constituencies and to firms connected to political parties. We evaluate these claims using new data on United States government contracts between 2003 and 2015. We find that executive departments, particularly more politicized department-wide offices, are the most likely to have contracts characterized by non-competitive procedures and outcomes, indicating favoritism. Politically responsive agencies – but only those – give out more non-competitive contracts in battleground states. We also observe greater turnover in firms receiving government contracts after party change in the White House, but only in the more politicized agencies. We conclude that agency designs that limit appointee representation in procurement decisions reduce political favoritism.
 
Subject Social Sciences
Bureaucratic politics
Distributive politics
Executive politics
Favoritism
Politicization
Procurement
 
Contributor Fazekas, Mihály
 
Source Fazekas, Mihály, Romain Ferrali, and Johannes Wachs. 2018. “Institutional quality, campaign contributions, and favouritism in US federal government contracting”. Working Paper series: GTI-WP/2018:01. Government Transparency Institute.



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