LFEs can help attract active support from many local elites. They may also help win votes directly, if voters like the patterns of expenditure they see. If LFEs can have such effects, the President ought to try to distribute them among local areas so as to produce the biggest possible election advantage. We assume the President is already committed to an overall election plan that includes such decisions as which States to go after in the Electoral College (Brams 1978, 98-107). Our concern is the targeting strategy the President may be expected to use in the context of such a plan.
The President will face a dilemma if the strategy that best appeals to voters is incompatible with the one best suited to local elites. We may expect this to be true if appointment-seeking local elites care about the absolute levels of their post-election LFE rewards, while retrospective voters who want to know ``what have you done for me lately'' care about recent changes in LFEs. Maximizing post-election levels for local elites may make it impossible to produce the pre-election changes that voters would like. The need to choose between local elites and voters may be obviated, however, if elites and voters do not care about the same kinds of LFEs. LFEs that elite-appointees can control relatively easily but that are virtually invisible or unfathomable to voters ought to be prime territory for elite-oriented maneuvers. On the other hand, features of LFEs that make them easy for voters to trace to the President may render them of little interest to local elites.
The institutional complexity of LFEs is likely to affect both their susceptibility to local elite control and the difficulty voters face in tracing them. Most complex are LFEs that pass through State or local governments before being disbursed into private hands, and over which the lower-level governments exercise some autonomous authority. Such LFEs offer local elites the most chances to determine who receives money, not only because institutional complexity creates many decision points at which they may intervene, but also because the allocations to private recipients in each local area are decided afresh in each instance. Elite-appointees are often closely connected to State and local governments and parties (e.g. Mackenzie 1981, 64). Intergovernmental LFEs often closely match local needs (Peterson, Rabe and Wong 1986, 81-94). We would expect that appointees often coordinate with officials at several levels of government to deliver special intergovernmental LFEs to their ``home'' areas (compare Haider 1974). Anyone not familiar with the negotiations that produce such expenditures--such as ordinary voters--may have a hard time deciding whom to credit for the results.
LFEs that go directly from the Federal government into individuals' hands are the least complex, and they are the easiest for individual voters to trace. The cleanest examples of such LFEs are transfer payments to individuals for entitlements or other social welfare expenditures. Transfer payments are not perfect conduits for tracing to Federal-level responsibility, because States and localities help fund some kinds of payments and have authority over some payment levels (Peterson and Rom 1990). But to a great extent transfer payments depend on entitlement rules and mandates set at the Federal level. Some administrations have gone to great lengths to make sure recipients of these kinds of spending credit the President for their good fortune (Tufte 1978, 30-32). Transfer payments are sufficiently complex that local elite appointees may be able to reallocate them geographically to some extent, but they will not be able to assign money to the recipients of their choice in each local area, as they would need to do to support elite-oriented direct targeting.
Other types of LFEs are less complex than intergovernmental LFEs in that money is not passed through lower-level governments, but they are more complex than transfer payments in the sense that local elites have more flexibility to designate recipients. Examples include military and civilian employment, military and civilian procurements, and other direct Federal payments. Assuming they can find out that spending in such categories has occurred, voters ought not to have much trouble assigning responsibility for such LFEs to the Federal level. These kinds of LFEs are therefore the ones most likely to present the President with conflicts between elite-oriented and voter-oriented strategies.
The targeting strategy to be expected for local elites is the one induced by the converted-loss appointments strategy. If the President is rewarding local elites through such a strategy, then after the election LFE levels ought to be highest in those areas where the President received more than half the votes, but less than an overwhelming proportion. Recall that a converted-loss strategy would make elites from such areas the most likely to receive new appointments and therefore put them in position to direct LFEs--new government jobs, procurements, intergovernmental grants--back to those areas. Locally oriented elites who expect to be rewarded for their campaign efforts will in general prefer higher levels of spending for their localities.
One might well say that, strictly speaking, the President does not have a targeting strategy for local elites. Rather we expect the actions of elite-appointees to induce a pattern in which there is more spending in areas where the President received somewhere in the range of 50-70% of the votes than there is in other areas. Patronage delegation ought to produce such elite-induced targeting.
The types of LFEs the President uses when targeting voters may differ from the types affected by elite-induced targeting, but at least in terms of the relation between LFEs and post-election support, similar types of geographic areas ought to be targeted in both cases. The scope and sizes of the changes the President can produce in LFEs to go after voters are not unlimited. The President will want to deploy the changes he can make to produce the largest possible increase in his reelection prospects. This implies that such changes will be concentrated in the areas where the President expects they are most likely to convert a loss to a win. Relative to the pre-election information the President uses to make the changes, we ought to observe the largest changes where his prospects look bad but not hopeless--say areas where his pre-election support appears to be somewhere in the range of 30-50%.