More federal legislators lead to more resources for their constituencies : evidence from exogenous differences in seat allocations

Electoral district magnitude varies across German electoral constituencies and over legislative periods due to Germany’s electoral system. The number of seats in parliament per constituency is effectively random. This setting permits us to investigate exogenous variations in district magnitude on federal resource allocation. We analyse the effect of having more than one federal representative per constituency on federal government resources by exploiting information from 1,375 German constituencies from 1998 to 2017. More representatives per constituency lead to statistically significantly more employment of federal civil servants in the respective constituencies. The size of the effect corresponds to about 34 federal civil servants once a constituency is represented by additional legislators from party lists. A battery of robustness tests supports our results. Further evidence points to some heterogeneity of the effect. In particular, constituencies represented by additional legislators who are experienced and who are members of larger, competing parties obtain more federal resources.