Local Economic Identity and Democratic Representation in Economic Policymaking

• In Event: Public Policy and Spatial Politics in American Political Economy

Abstract

In an ongoing book project, I dig deep into the politics of US farm policy to grapple with a broader puzzle of public policy and democratic representation. Namely, how do particularistic policies persist in majoritarian democracies when—almost by definition—such policies typically benefit a small fraction of the electorate? In a working paper constituting a prior contribution to this book project (Jares 2023), I draw on a variety of sources of administrative data to document and investigate the surprising resilience of the US farm safety net. Born out of the Great Depression, US farm programs have remained robustly intact throughout 18 successive reauthorization hurdles, despite consistent opposition from free market conservatives and an order-of-magnitude collapse in the relative economic stature of the farming sector. Analyzing legislators’ constituency composition and legislative behavior, I demonstrate that the broad support farm programs continue to receive owes little to the votes and resources that program beneficiaries provide to legislators.

Instead, I conjecture that farm programs persist largely out of legislators’ more direct objective to support what I term “distinctly local enterprise”: businesses that are uniquely linked to their district, and distinct from businesses found in other parts of the country. I demonstrate that, due to the stark economic geography of agriculture, farming is not a pivotal economic industry in almost any congressional district, but it is nonetheless present in most districts. Since the businesses supported by farm programs are usually small enough to be contained within a single district, and often produce commodities that differ from those produced in other regions of the country, I posit that legislators spend extensive political capital advocating for their districts’ farmers because of such farmers’ status as distinctly local enterprise.

In prior work, I have demonstrated that this theory provides a good description of legislative behavior. However, in an in-progress book chapter that I propose here to present at APSA, I investigate the mechanisms through which this “distinctly local enterprise” affinity arises and shapes legislators’ policy preferences. Does the starkly disproportionate patronage enjoyed by local growers stem from legislators’ intrinsic concern for their prosperity? Or, do legislators view this pork-barrel spending as a particularly efficacious tool for cultivating a “home style” that will reap dividends among the broader district electorate (Fenno 1978)? In the latter case, are legislators accurately perceiving what motivates voters, or does the volume and frequency of interest group lobbying systematically bias politicians’ estimates of the electoral returns to farm program advocacy?

I answer these questions by fielding survey experiments among the mass public, congressional staffers, and state and local elected officials. To measure the tradeoffs that voters and politicians perceive in making farm policy, I leverage the inclusion of nutrition assistance (e.g. SNAP) and geographically distinct crops in the farm bill to present respondents with highly realistic farm bill budget negotiation dilemmas. In experiments that manipulate the nature of hypothetical budget cut alternatives that respondents must choose between, I assess the attributes of particularistic spending that voters and political elites find intrinsically compelling, as well as the extent to which such attributes have a bearing on (a) voters’ decisions at the ballot box and (b) political elites’ perceptions of what matters for voters at the ballot box. In doing so, I assess whether political elites are intrinsically motivated to support growers of distinctly local crops, whether such elites perceive substantial electoral costs to turning against farm programs, and why conservative elites appear more eager to pursue cuts to safety net spending for the poor rather than safety net spending for farmers.

These survey experiments allow my investigation of the politics of US farm policy to yield broader lessons for our understanding of the American political economy. My results will speak to the sources of disproportionate representation of business groups in the economic policymaking arena, and they will also shed light on the inconsistent role of free market and conservative economic ideology in shaping legislators’ policymaking priorities. In uncovering the mechanisms by which groups are overrepresented and unrepresented in the American political economy, this work speaks directly to the 2024 conference theme calling for understanding retrenchment, renovation, and reimagination of democratic inclusion.

Author

• Jake Alton Jares, Stanford University Graduate School of Business