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Party Nationalization and the Politics of Geographic Redistribution in Spain

This paper argues that the nationalization of electoral alignments and party organization has repercussions for the extent to which 'regional favouritism' is a dominant feature of distributive policy in a particular country. In particular, coalitional politics in the presence of parties with narrow geographic bases of support, such as regional parties or parties with regionalized patterns of support, may encourage 'over-investment' by central governments in distributive log-rolling and regional pork-barrel spending. Empirically, the paper explores patterns in the regional allocation of infrastructure investment to Provinces by central government in Spain from 1978-2010, and tests two central hypotheses. Firstly, it investigates the extent to which regional parties in Spain have historically been able to secure disproportional investment for core support constituencies, when these parties are pivotal for government formation. Secondly, we explore a more novel hypothesis relating the relative nationalization of the major governing parties of the democratic era, to their propensity to engage in political distribution towards favoured electoral constituencies. The paper finds that parties vary significantly in their use of tactical 'pork-barrel' spending, depending on the degree to which their electoral support is 'nationalized' across all regions within the country.