On the political economy of state highway expenditures: Some evidence of the relative performance of alternative public choice models

This paper explores the extent to which the public demand for roads and/or power of special interest groups determines road expenditures at the state level using an extension of the methodology developed in Congleton and Shughart (1990). Reduced form models of median voter demand, special interest group equilibria, and a combined model are estimated using cross-sectional state data from the United States. We generally find support for the hypothesis that voting matters. The pure median voter models have a better fit than the pure special interest group models. Moreover, in our combined model, we find that variables from the median-voter model can not be dropped without significantly reducing the combined model's fit.