Much has been written about pork barrel politics at the national level in America. In his seminal study of the South's transformation, From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt (1991), Bruce Schulman demonstrated that southern Senators have consistently directed federal funds towards their region for electoral gain. Far less attention, by comparison, has been paid to how state governors have acquired and spent federal funds, particularly those available from the grants-in-aid system. What has been argued is that governors take grants almost out of desperation. Not willing to turn down capital, incumbents have eagerly drawn on federal resources to offset their financial problems, even accepting grants for programs not supported by their core constituents.

Sean Nicholson-Crotty's well-conceptualized and lucidly written study challenges this apolitical narrative of US fiscal federalism. Consider, he asks, why certain governors opted out of expanding Medicare provision under the Affordable Care Act (after the Supreme Court made this legal in 2013). Why, too, did others reject high-speed-rail funding from the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, or grants to expand unemployment insurance from that same measure? The answer, according to Nicholson-Crotty, is that governors think strategically about how to solicit and spend federal monies, recognizing that there are not only partisan benefits to doing so but also “significant electoral incentives” (134).

To substantiate his case, Nicholson-Crotty first sets out his theoretical framework, which he does by linking two concepts that have hitherto been treated separately by political scientists. The first is the partisan theory of public expenditures, which states that elected officials will acquire and spend money to benefit their core constituents. The second is electoral theory, which holds that, as an election approaches, officials may decide to alter their spending patterns to capture noncore voters. By combining these concepts and applying them to state–local politics, Nicholson-Crotty argues that governors can, at least in theory, benefit both politically and electorally from the grants-in-aid system.

The rest of Nicholson-Crotty's study tests these two hypotheses. Using data on the receipt and expenditure of grants in all fifty states over the past three decades, as well as speeches by governors and interviews with state officials, Nicholson-Crotty shows convincingly that the partisan theory of public expenditure can help explain why governors acquire and spend federal grants in the way that they do. By comparing grant applications for the Department of Health and Human Services with those for the Department of Justice during the 2006 gubernatorial elections, he demonstrates that there was a significant shift away from the latter and towards the former when Democrats replaced Republicans. Moreover, when spending grants, Nicholson-Crotty reveals, Republican governors typically “divert[ed] federal funds into private goods” (109) between 1971 and 2005. Combined with a host of other examples, the author thus provides compelling evidence that the first part of his argument is correct: governors will pursue and spend grants to benefit core voters.

His data is less useful, however, at substantiating the second, and arguably the more critical, theoretical premise of his book, namely that during elections governors who are not certain of victory will adapt their pursuit and expenditure of grants to appeal to noncore voters. Indeed, though Nicholson-Crotty demonstrates that Republican governors were more aggressive in their pursuit of grants from President Obama's Race to the Top program as they approached reelection, that Democrats in the same circumstances would divert more grant funds into lower taxes, and that Republicans have been less likely to use waivers to modify grants to make them more appealing to core voters nearer to elections, the evidence amassed is certainly not as “substantial” (136) as he asserts.

Nevertheless, Nicholson-Crotty provides a new interpretation of fiscal federalism in the American states. He shows convincingly that governors think politically and strategically when using federal grants, even if they do not aim to attract noncore voters to the extent that he asserts. In doing so, he demonstrates that the grants-in-aid system is a less efficient tool for federal policymaking than many would have us believe, that it provides the states with a means to undermine the power of the federal government, and that it also plays more of a role in gubernatorial elections than existing scholarship has appreciated. At the state as well as at the national level, then, Nicholson-Crotty shows that pork barrel politics is very much alive and well.