Elections sometimes give policy makers incentives to pander, i.e., to implement a policy that voters think is in their best interest, even though the policy maker knows that a different policy is actually better for the voters. Pandering incentives are typically attenuated when voters learn,...

This paper tests various hypotheses about distributive politics by studying the distributionof federal spending across U.S. states over the period 1978-2002. We improve onprevious work by using survey data to measure the share of voters in each state that areDemocrats, Republicans, and...