| Description |
In advanced democracies, most government spending is allocated according to criteria approved by a legislature but implemented by the bureaucracy. I ask whether this fact imposes a binding constraint on the ability of legislators to engage in targeted redistribution, by constructing a model in which legislators are constrained to allocate spending by a formula of limited dimension - in contrast to benchmark models where proposers have the flexibility to manipulate the payoffs of individual members directly. The model predicts over-sized winning coalitions, positive distributions outside of the winning coalition, and the emergence of persistent voting blocs. I then apply the model to a sample of 31 US federal spending bills, using new data connecting spending outcomes to authorizing legislation. I find that most allocation formulas for spending programs involve 5 or fewer factors. Formulaic allocation imposes a tight constraint on targeting, eliminating more than 90% of Congressional proposers' degrees of freedom.
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