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ABSTRACT
Previous research finds that grant spending can improve the standing of politicians and institutions with some in the public. It is unclear whether this effect holds for federal agencies as well, which are largely responsible for allocating these funds. We develop a theory that links agency grant spending to the likelihood of an individual supporting the awarding federal agency, with the expectation that this relationship is conditioned by the citizen’s partisan identification. Using a survey experiment, we find that an increase in federal grant spending, from agencies that they politically oppose, is associated with Republicans offering a more negative evaluation.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Supplemental data
Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/14719037.2022.2162956
Correction Statement
This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1. It should be noted that our argument applies to citizens and non-citizens. We also use the term ‘citizen’ interchangeably with ‘individual’. We use the term ‘citizen’ in this context to remain consistent with previous research. Additionally, we do not screen out non-American citizen respondents in MTurk. Our empirical approach combined with the use of the term ‘citizen’ is the standard for research pertaining to performance evaluations by the public (e.g. Kelly and Swindell Citation2002; Miller Citation2016; Morgeson et al. Citation2021). We remain consistent with previous research.
2. Federal grant dollars are widely recognized as a form of particularistic spending. Particularistic spending is money intended to be funnelled to a specific constituency (Kriner and Reeves Citation2015).
3. A recently blooming strain of research explores the relationship between federal agencies and the allocation of federal grants (Anderson and Potoski Citation2016; Berry Christopher and Jacob Citation2017; Miller Citation2016; Napolio Citation2021). For example, scholars have analysed whether more politicized agencies via presidential appointments (Berry Christopher and Jacob Citation2017; Napolio Citation2021) and structurally independent agencies (Anderson and Potoski Citation2016) are more likely to allocate these grant funds to certain communities based on political motives.
4. It is important to highlight that we expect that the effects from an increase in grant funding to vary based on a citizen’s partisan identification. Republicans will respond to an increase in spending, but it is conditional on the agency’s political inclinations. Conversely, a Democrat’s evaluation does not vary by the agency’s political tendencies. The fact that Republicans and Democrats respond differently to the awarding agency conditioned on whether it is a political ally is one of the central elements to our theory. This also helps to explain the novelty of our findings.
5. A copy of the survey can be found in Appendix G. For more information on the survey and the question wording, please reach out to the authors.
6. Recent research finds that the MTurk subject pool is a fairly representative of the population relative to other crowdsourcing sources (Berinsky, Huber, and Lenz Citation2012; Mullinix et al. Citation2015). Research also finds that the subjects on MTurk are fairly representative of the broader population in terms of ideology and other political preferences (Scott, Jewell, and Waggoner Citation2015).
7. We also included a debriefing statement at the end of the survey that allowed the participants to withdraw from the study.
8. We need to recognize an important limitation to our study. In our experiment, the vignettes do not clearly identify whether the state and local government actually spent the grant money. There are several high-profile incidences where state governments have rejected funds awarded by a federal agency. We encourage future scholars to analyse this issue in greater detail and to determine whether a change in the wording of the experiment has any impact on the results. Additionally, we use the term ‘grant spending’ to be consistent with prior research (i.e. Miller Citation2016). One could also interpret from our vignette that our experiment’s treatment actually captures whether an agency is allocated extra money (and the federal agency is expected to award it to the respondent’s home state). This is another issue that should be analysed in greater detail by future scholars.
9. The FAADS documents the transfer funds from almost all federal grants.
10. In our analysis, we treat the treatment variable as a categorical variable. As a robustness test, we have also estimated a model in which the treatment variable is coded as a continuous variable. The results are similar to those presented here (see Appendix F).
11. In Appendix H, we provide descriptive statistics for the data used in this analysis.
12. Specifically, these coefficients of interest allow us to determine whether an increase in grant spending impacts an individual’s evaluation of the awarding agency. Additionally, these coefficients inform us whether the awarding agency’s political leanings can impact an individual’s evaluation of the agency’s performance conditioned on the respondent’s own partisan identity.
13. To demonstrate the robustness of our findings, we have also estimated several additional models that interact the political trust variable and presidential approval variable with some of the other explanatory variables in our models. The findings do not vary substantively from those presented here. The results are available upon request from the authors.
14. Another important potential limitation to our study is that we did not conduct a pilot experiment. Previous scholarship has suggested that test piloting survey experiments can help to strengthen a study’s validity (McDermott Citation2011). Instead of test piloting, we heavily followed prior research in designing our survey experiment (Lyons and Miller Citation2019; Miller and Ruder Citation2020). This should assuage most concerns regarding this issue. However, we encourage future scholarship to examine this topic in greater detail.
15. Additionally, previous research has uncovered that a relationship exists between federal grant spending and the awarding agency’s approval rating (Miller Citation2016). Our findings show which citizens are affected by an increase in grant funds. Consistent with other studies (i.e. Lazarus and Reilly Citation2010) we find that an increase in grant spending does not result in an increase in approval among Republicans. These findings further highlight how Republican and Democratic citizens have drastically different views on public policy.
16. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2022 Annual Meeting of the Southern Political Science Association. We would like to thank Lavonne Carlile, Michael S. Lynch, Beth Rauhaus, Philip Rhoades, Geoffrey Sheagley, Eric Stokan, the anonymous reviewers, and the Editors of Public Management Review for their helpful suggestions and comments.