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The Bidding Game: Competitive Funding Regimes and the Political Targeting of Urban Programme Schemes

Public bodies adopt procedures for the competitive bidding for funds in the belief that they improve public welfare, while critics regard such practices as a waste of resources and open to political manipulation. We test the operation of a competitive bidding regime through Tobit models of data drawn from successful and unsuccessful bids in four years of the Single Regeneration Budget programme in England. We derive hypotheses from a model of competitive bidding, the official evaluation of the programme and the pork-barrel literature. Our data and statistical models show that successive rounds did not greatly improve the quality of the bids, did not systematically reward needy communities and diverted resources to ministers' parliamentary seats in some regions.