Sophisticated Voting and Agenda Independence in the Distributive Politics Setting

This paper characterizes agenda independent outcomes in a distributive, or "pork barrel," setting. We assume each legislator has a list of projects for which funding is sought. Each project provides benefits that are concentrated in each district but imposes costs that must be borne by all districts. A bill consists of some subset of the projects proposed by all the legislators. We show that even when there is no Condorcet winner among the possible bills, there can be an "agenda independent" bill, that is, one that is immune to any attempt to amend it by any admissible agenda. We show that any agenda independent outcome has a small project minimal winning coalition bias.

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