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1. Introduction
Is particularistic government spending a result of political institutions that allow
politicians to target benefits to their own districts, while dispersing costs? This question has
been addressed in the US context, characterized by single-member districts and legislative
bargaining based on norms of “universalism”. Under these circumstances, the “Law of 1/n,”
proposed by Weingast, Shepsle, and Johnsen (1981, henceforth WSJ), states that distributive
spending increases with the number of legislators. The mechanism at work is a common pool
problem: government expenditures on particularistic projects will be above economically
optimal levels because each legislator’s district pays for only a small fraction of any spending
item.
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Although the domain terrain of WSJ’s Law of 1/n is in explaining the variance in
particularistic government expenditures, not the overall size of government, existing tests
trying to assess its empirical content have concentrated on government size. Baqir (1999)
argues that the law of 1/n generally holds true in American city councils, showing that larger
city councils are associated with greater spending. He also finds that the effect is weaker in
city councils containing at-large members (from proportional representation districts),
suggesting that single member districts are crucial for the operation of the “law”. In a cross-
national study, Crain and Bradbury (2001) similarly demonstrate that government
consumption is directly related to the size of the legislature. They add the important caveat,
however, that when an upper legislative chamber exists, the number of seats in that chamber
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Baron (1991) qualifies this result, writing that the common pool problem can be mitigated through procedural
control in the legislature which generates Minimal Winning Coalitions (MWC) instead of universalism. Hence,
a norm of “universalism,” where legislators logroll each other’s projects, is not a strictly necessary condition for
overspending in models of distributive politics.
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Capital expenditures contain: 1) acquisition of fixed capital assets, 2) purchases of stocks, 3) purchases of land
and intangible assets, 4) capital transfers: domestic, to other levels of national government, to non-financial
public enterprises, to financial institutions, to other enterprises and other domestic capital transfers, and abroad.
Convention