In this dissertation I study the impacts of a few key features of the United State's majoritarian political system. I investigate the effect of representation, majority political party affiliation in addition to how redistricting shapes the types of politicians that represent a state.

A large literature suggests that U.S. politicians are active participants in geographically targeting funds to their district. However, the motivations for politicians to pursue pork-barrel spending have not been tested empirically. In the initial chapter I use redistricting announcements as a natural experiment to test if politicians respond to changes in electoral incentives. During redistricting, congressional representatives learn mid-term what their new district will look like in the subsequent election, creating differential incentives for targeting within their current district. After learning their new district’s boundaries, a representative who uses pork to help win re-election no longer has an incentive to target pork to places within their district that they will no longer seek to represent in the future. I find that following a redistricting announcement is made, areas that remain in their district receive $0.75-$0.97 in federal project grants per-capita (25% of mean per-capita project grants) more than areas that will be redistricted, quantifying the degree to which members of Congress are forward-looking.

In chapter 3, I estimate the impact of majority political party representation on the distribution of intergovernmental funds using a regression discontinuity design. I use state elections instead of federal elections, which allow for testing heterogenous effects of majority party affiliation with government unification. The results suggest that the distinction between divided and unified governments is a crucial component to local distributive politics. I find effects ranging from increases of 1.2% to 3.7%, with the largest effects occurring when a representative is affiliated with the political party of a unified government. There is no impact found when the government is divided.

In the final chapter, along with co-authors Ken Coriale and Ethan Kaplan, I estimate the impact of a political party’s legal ability to unilaterally redistrict Congressional seats upon partisan seat share allocations in the U.S. House of Representatives. Controlling for state-decade and year effects, we find an 8.2 percentage point increase in the Republican House seat share in the three elections following Republican control over redistricting in the past two decades. We find no significant or sizable effect for Democrats. The effects over the past five decades in aggregate are smaller and insignificant for both parties. In the past two decades, these effects are sizable though not pivotal for Congressional control.