The DOI matches its Crossref record.
The Political Economy of Benefits and Costs: A Neoclassical Approach to Distributive Politics
Abstract
This essay offers a rational political explanation for the notorious inefficiency of pork barrel projects with an optimization model of legislative behavior and legislative institutions. The model emphasizes the (economically arbitrary, from a welfare point of view) importance of the geographic incidence of benefits and costs owing to the geographic basis for political representation. We explore the implications of a legislator's objective function and derive conditions under which a representative legislature will select an omnibus of projects each of which exceeds the efficient scale.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cited by
Text as Data: The Promise and Pitfalls of Automatic Content Analysis Methods for Political Texts
Grimmer, J., & Stewart, B. M. (2013) · Political Analysis · doi:10.1093/pan/mps028 · Cited by 3,297
Myopic Voters and Natural Disaster Policy
HEALY, A., & MALHOTRA, N. (2009) · American Political Science Review · doi:10.1017/s0003055409990104 · Cited by 931
Second generation fiscal federalism: The implications of fiscal incentives
Weingast, B. R. (2009) · Journal of Urban Economics · doi:10.1016/j.jue.2008.12.005 · Cited by 710
Self-citationReviving Leviathan: Fiscal Federalism and the Growth of Government
Rodden, J. (2003) · International Organization · doi:10.1017/s0020818303574021 · Cited by 462
The Tinpot and the Totalitarian: An Economic Theory of Dictatorship
Wintrobe, R. (1990) · American Political Science Review · doi:10.2307/1962769 · Cited by 430
Metadata
- Authors
- Weingast, B. R., Shepsle, K. A., & Johnsen, C.
- Venue
- Journal of Political Economy
- Publisher
- University of Chicago Press
- Published
- 1981-08
- Volume
- 89
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 642-664
- ISSN
- 0022-3808 (ISSN-L)
- 1537-534X
- OpenAlex
- W2076316673
- Cited by
- 1,736
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 32.33
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: The Political Economy of Benefits and Costs: A Neoclassical Approach to Distributive Politics. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1086/260997
- The paper
- Weingast, B. R., Shepsle, K. A., & Johnsen, C. (1981). The Political Economy of Benefits and Costs: A Neoclassical Approach to Distributive Politics. Journal of Political Economy. https://doi.org/10.1086/260997
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
