Lesser of Two Evils: Allocating Resources to Opposition Districts in Pakistan

• Published date: 01 May 2023
• Author: Rabia Malik
• Date: 01 May 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lsq.12398

241

RABIA MALIK

University of Essex

Lesser of Two Evils: Allocating

Resources to Opposition Districts in

Pakistan

Though many scholars find that incumbent party legislators benefit from

higher access to distributive resources than opposition ones, there is less attention

on how resources are distributed among opposition districts. In most contexts,

opposition districts cannot be fully cut off from funds and opposition legislators

get credit for spending in their constituencies, which harms the ruling party. I

argue that, in such situations, the incumbent party will discriminate between its

own legislators and opposition ones but this discrimination will be based on op-

position swing districts being punished rather than opposition strongholds. Using

data on federal development funds from Pakistan and fixed- effects estimators, I

show that the difference in funds between opposition and ruling party legislators

is driven by opposition swing districts while their core areas have similar access

as the incumbent party’s own districts. The findings further our understanding of

distributive politics and have potential implications for long- term development

patterns.

How do incumbent parties distribute resources to opposi-

tion districts? Many scholars have found that incumbents dis-

tribute more funds to their co- partisans (e.g., Ansolabehere

and Snyder 2006; Keefer and Khemani 2009; Khemani 2003;

Lazarus2010; Lee2003; Malik 2021; Schady2000) and that they

will also often “punish” opposition legislators (e.g., Diaz- Cayeros,

Magaloni, and Weingast 2003; Magaloni 2006; Rodden 2004);

these are particularly sensible strategies when incumbents are con-

cerned that opposition members will get credit for any spending

incumbents incur in opposition constituencies. At the same time,

however, it is often impossible to entirely cut off opposition areas

from resources, which leads to the question of how incumbent par-

ties distribute funds within opposition areas.

In this article, I propose an argument for a distributive strat-

egy by the incumbent party whereby opposition swing district

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial

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properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.

LEGISLATIVE STUDIES QUARTERLY, 48, 2, May 2023

DOI: 10.1111/lsq.12398

© 2022 The Author. Legislative Studies Quarterly published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of

Washington University in St. Louis.

242 Rabia Malik

legislators are punished while opposition legislators who win by

large margins are provided access to resources. This argument is

based on two realistic assumptions I discuss in detail subsequently.

First, that opposition legislators can claim credit for spending in

their constituencies and, second, that the ruling party cannot en-

tirely cut off the opposition from access to resources.

The intuition for the argument is as follows: when opposition

legislators are likely to get credit for spending from voters, this

hurts the ruling party. Given that the ruling party cannot entirely

cut off all opposition legislators from distributive resources, due

to potential electoral and reputational concerns, it is less costly

for them to provide opposition strongholds with resources rather

than marginal opposition districts. The opposition strongholds are

the ones where the ruling party is unlikely to win any way so po-

tentially “increasing” the opposition legislator’s popularity there

is low cost to the ruling party. At the same time, withholding ac-

cess to resources from an opposition legislator who won by a small

margin is more beneficial since opposition marginal districts are

more likely to swing back to the incumbent party if the current

(opposition) legislator is unable to provide projects to her district.

I clarify this argument through a simple formal model as well.

I test the resultant hypothesis of distributive fund allocation

patterns using data on Pakistan from a Constituency Development

Fund (CDF) that ran from 1988 to 2013 and promised, on paper

at least, the same amount of money to each federal legislator for

undertaking small development projects in her electoral district.

Several features of this fund, including the equal- access rule and

how strongly projects from it are associated with each individ-

ual legislator, make it ideal for testing my argument. Despite the

promised equal allocation, the actual distributive patterns often

differed (Malik 2021); features of Pakistani politics that allow

such manipulation are also discussed. The main finding is that

opposition core districts are associated with approximately 50

percentage points higher access to their share of the fund than

opposition swing districts. Importantly, electoral margins do not

matter within ruling party districts, indicating that this is not just

a symmetric core- swing allocation pattern that incumbent parties

pursue regardless of party affiliation; rather, opposition districts

are dealt with strategically. These findings are robust to control-

ling for differences between legislators and their districts, and to

accounting for time- invariant differences between administrations

and administrative districts.