The so-called are based on hiding the authorship of the amendments. Here’s a paradox: Why don’t the authors of budget amendments claim credit for their sponsorship?
Claiming credit for works and provision of services is an essential part of what parliamentarians do in any democracy. The expression credit claiming entered the jargon of political science through which it also identified two other activities fundamental to political survival: propaganda, e.g. be present for name recognition and position taking, which aims to defend the flags of your electorate rather than changing policies.
Depending on the institutional characteristics of the country, the vote can be more or less partisan or —its opposite— personal, the vote fueled by benefits concentrated in specific localities (in the jargon, pork barrel). Being able to claim political credit for the benefit is universally confused with parliamentary activity. A Texas senator became famous when he stated that if by some irrationality the American Congress approved a project for a cheese factory on the moon, he would want “the company’s heavenly headquarters” to be in Texas, the contractor to be a Texan, and for the milk also came from Texan cows.
David Samuels, in a pioneering work carried out in 2002, argues that the sponsorship of localist projects does not involve the exchange of votes for concentrated benefit, but rather the exchange of projects for campaign resources. Thus, localist projects irrigated local political campaigns. The argument took into account another paradox: the low correlation between local votes and projects, but high correlations between votes and campaign funds. Anecdotal evidence for the 2024 elections suggests otherwise: the amendments assured victory for their sponsors. But the nexus between (illicit) corporate campaign financing and voting re-emerges directly in a new format.
The lack of credit claims may therefore be due to the potential for harm to their sponsors and simultaneously as a source of corrupt arrangements. Which do not focus on this area: the biggest corruption scandals in the country involved the largest public companies, the largest pension funds and directly implicated the federal executive. These are different types of, euphemistically speaking, political activity that is not very republican.
The lack of claims is also obviously due to the flexibility —liquidity, it would be more precise— that they allow: there are no projects, which generates great speed.
Scott Frisch, author of Cheese Factories in the Moon, argues that localist projects are good for American democracy by strengthening the nexus between representatives and their electorate. The same applies mutatis mutandis to our democracy. But there is a previous question: what allows a legislature that has almost total control of the budget, which is globally imposing, not to degenerate into localism? The answer necessarily goes through our party system. As I have already discussed here in the column, .
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