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Introduction
Much scholarly attention has focused on how collective resources are distributed among
legislators as particularistic or “pork barrel” goods. While the funding of such projects
ostensibly occupies a good deal of legislative attention, it is not the sole focus of legislators’
energies. A major concern among legislators is also how to allocate resources to collective, or
public, goods from which all legislators and citizens extract benefits. Consistent with this
argument, a primary motivation for constitutional framers was endowing the national
government with authority to provide for various public goods such as national defense:
The principal purposes to be answered by union are these—the common defense
of the members; the preservation of the public peace, as well as against internal
convulsions as external attacks; the regulation of commerce with other nations
and between the States; the superintendence of our intercourse, political and
commercial, with foreign countries (Hamilton, Federalist 23).
All of these issues mentioned by Hamilton – national defense, the regulation of interstate
commerce, and so on – speak to the national government providing some sort of public good that
requires lawmakers to put aside the parochial interests of individual states. With such attention
being focused on the provision of collective goods, it is unfortunate that there has been little
theoretical work focusing on how a legislature might provide collective goods in conjunction
with (or in competition with) particularistic benefits to individual legislators. We address this
void in the literature by analyzing how a majoritarian legislature divides resources among its
members when legislators value these different kinds of policies. Building upon the Baron-
Ferejohn divide-the-dollar framework, we seek to answer several questions about the lawmaking
process, including the following:
First, under what conditions will we see the legislature eschewing collective goods
policies altogether? Second, under what conditions will we see the legislature passing laws that
Convention