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Abstract
One of the most important debates in the distributive politics literature is who receives allocation. Previous studies on Taiwan’s distributive politics have examined predominantly the role played by the president, legislators and the local governments. The distributive strategies of local councilors, however, have been overlooked. Few explain the variations in the amount of resources within councilors’ electoral districts. Using data on local infrastructure expenditures by the 12 Taipei City councilors, this study investigates how rational politicians allocate infrastructure resources in order to maximize the probabilities of reelection, and whether local councilors use resources to reward their core supporters or to expand their support bases. We identify two dimensions—whether to allocate and the amount of money spent by councilors — to the mechanisms of resource allocation. Based on multilevel Tobit regression analysis, we first examine whether councilors tend to favor important sub-constituencies or not. The results indicate that councilors do reward their core supporters with public resources to maintain their electoral bases. However, there is no significant difference in the amount of resources no matter how important the area is. Overall, our findings support the core hypothesis and point out that the allocation mechanism of city councilors should be revised.
Abstract
It's an interesting subject that the visiting schedule of the president and vice-president is based on the premise of limited time, which might indicate an important research that related to the distributive politics. With the calculation of the township trips of the highest executive leaders in Taiwan, the number would be taken as a dependent variable, so as to analyze the model of schedule arrangements and to contrast the model to two basic models, ”swing voters model” and ”support groups model”. According to the results of Tobit regression analysis, the consideration for visiting schedule of former president Chen and vice-president Lu is basically decided by the chances to seek reelection. Being the president and vice-president for the first term and ready to be the candidates for the second term, Chen and Lu arranged more local trips to townships whose political tendency are categorized as swing groups in the previous election. Successfully winning the second term of presidency, however, Chen and Lu's visiting schedule shifts to support model; they turned to townships whose vote rates were higher than others in the reelection and townships where received more benefit during their first term.
