For too long, research on retrospective voting has fixated on how economic trends affect incumbents' electoral prospects in national and state elections. Hundreds of thousands of elections in the United States occur at the local level and have little to do with unemployment or inflation rates....

Contrary to the prevailing view that federal programs are immortal, we show that program death is commonplace and seek to explain why. We develop a simple model of distributive politics, which we call "probabilistic universalism." Our theory suggests that differences in the ideological...

Empirical research on distributive politics emphasizes party and committee leaders in Congress. This paper highlights the president, who most credibly fills the role of the proposer in Baron and Ferejohn’s (1989) seminal model, and who has further opportunities to influence the distribution of...