2. Pursuing the Pork Barrel

2018 ◽  
pp. 17-40
Keyword(s):  
Pork Barrel

Oceanography: Earmark for New Ship Puts Academics Over Pork Barrel

Science ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 273 (5272) ◽  
pp. 176-0
Author(s):  
J. Mervis
Keyword(s):  
Pork Barrel

Commodity Price Cycles, the Agricultural Trap, and Thailand's Incessant Subsidies

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 49-69
Author(s):  
Bhanupong Nidhiprabha
Keyword(s):  
Public Investment ◽  
Commodity Prices ◽  
Commodity Price ◽  
Natural Process ◽  
Farm Sector ◽  
Push And Pull Factors ◽  
Excess Supply ◽  
Pork Barrel ◽  
Push And Pull ◽  
Farm Subsidies

During Thailand's economic development, the shares of output and employment in agriculture have been consistently higher than in other countries at the same level of income. There are push and pull factors for labor transformation. This paper demonstrates that the slow transformation from rural to urban economy is the result of the agricultural trap, which keeps agrarian labor inside the farm sector. In addition to the lack of public investment in human capital, extremely wasteful farm subsidies have weakened the natural process of structural transformation. Farm subsidies encourage land expansion, which usually lags behind commodity booms, resulting in the excess supply of farm products. In turn, when commodity prices collapse, excess supply perpetuates further subsidies and emboldens the pork barrel activities of incumbent governments.

Civil Defense—the New Debate

Worldview ◽  
1979 ◽  
Vol 22 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 45-45
Author(s):  
Richard J. Barnet
Keyword(s):  
Local Communities ◽  
Civil Defense ◽  
Carter Administration ◽  
Modest Increase ◽  
Pork Barrel ◽  
Defense Expenditure ◽  
Local Officials ◽  
Military Expenditures ◽  
Highway System

The policy of the Carter administration is to increase substantially civil defense expenditures. In terms of moiney it is not a “majority priority,” since the administration plans to lock us into overall military expenditures on the order of $1.8 trillion in 1977 dollars by 1988. The justification for the increased civil defense expenditure’ is that it is a “modest” increase in response to demands for a much bigger program and a counter to the Soviet program. There is a strong pork barrel element in the program too. Just as civil defense was the justification for building the nation's highway, system, it is now being quietly presented to local officials as a way to get some money into local communities in a time of austerity. It is also a way to buy off opposition to a SALT treaty, or so it is thought.All such justifications for the program are utterly irresponsible. To spend billions on civil defense when crucial programs essential to the strength of the nation are being slashed is pathological. Appeasing critics of the SALT treaty by throwing them a “harmless” bone is self-defeating, for the program lends credibility to their view of reality, not that of the treaty advocates, and creates a climate in which it is easier to defeat the treaty.

scholarly journals Pandering and pork-barrel politics

2019 ◽  
Vol 176 ◽  
pp. 79-93 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Maskin ◽  
Jean Tirole
Keyword(s):  
Pork Barrel

The Birth of Pork: Local Appropriations in America’s First Century

2018 ◽  
Vol 112 (3) ◽  
pp. 564-579 ◽  
Author(s):  
SANFORD C. GORDON ◽  
HANNAH K. SIMPSON
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
Distributive Politics ◽  
Historical Period ◽  
Pork Barrel ◽  
Historical Factors ◽  
Credit Claiming ◽  
Ideological Structure ◽  
The U.S

After describing a newly assembled dataset consisting of almost 9,000 local appropriations made by the U.S. Congress between 1789 and 1882, we test competing accounts of the politics surrounding them before offering a more nuanced, historically contingent view of the emergence of the pork barrel. We demonstrate that for most of this historical period—despite contemporary accusations of crass electoral motives—the pattern of appropriations is largely inconsistent with accounts of distributive politics grounded in a logic of legislative credit-claiming. Instead, support for appropriations in the House mapped cleanly onto the partisan/ideological structure of Congress for most of this period, and only in the 1870s produced the universalistic coalitions commonly associated with pork-barrel spending. We trace this shift to two historical factors: the emergence of a solid Democratic South, and growth in the fraction of appropriations funding recurrent expenditures on extant projects rather than new starts.

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