Congressional Elections and Local Federal Spending,

Abstract

In this paper, we report on an investigation of the political value of federal spending in congressional elections. The basic hypothesis can be stated simply: An incumbent congressman's reelection prospects are positively related to changes in federal spending in his district. To test this hypothesis, we focus on two relationships: the dependence of the incumbent's vote on changes in local federal spending, expressed in percentage terms, and the dependence of campaign expenditures (for the incumbent and the challenger) or changes in local federal spending, expressed in percentage terms. These relations are examined on the basis of data from individual districts for each of three elections: 1980, 1978, and 1976.