Stephanie Rickard’s Spending to Win is a welcome return to an institutional-themed approach to the policy impacts of electoral rules. Scholars have long agreed that different rules affect not only who wins elections, but also what kinds of policy the resulting legislators enact. The problem, however, has been in measuring the dependent variable. Rickard has a novel approach to this vexing problem, using a comparative study of government subsidies. She considers these issues within a context of varying concentrations of industry, arguing that different electoral systems lead politicians to target constituencies that are more or less diffuse. The theoretical propositions are provocative, and although they and the data analysis in the book are not without their weaknesses, Rickard has provided a very useful roadmap for continuing the search for the impact of institutions on politics and policies.

The author’s theoretical interest is based on combining the literature regarding the “personal vote,” as described by John Carey and Matthew Shugart (“Incentives to Cultivate a Personal Vote: A Rank Ordering of Electoral Formulas,” Electoral Studies, 14(4), 1995) with an interest in economic geography, on the supposition that different electoral systems encourage politicians to be more or less interested in local constituencies. The first part of the book focuses on the distinction between single-member districts (SMDs; plurality) and proportional representation (PR), with the latter encouraging support of broader constituencies. In later chapters, Rickard breaks PR into two basic types, open and closed lists, arguing that because open-list systems encourage a greater personal vote, they support more local targeting. Under closed-list systems, by contrast, “legislators and party leaders tend to eschew narrowly targeted programs in favor of programs that benefit people across the country” (p. 150). Given her emphasis on subsidies, this means that single-member districts and open-list PR generate more subsidies to concentrated industries, whereas systems with closed-list PR should spend subsidies on industries that are more evenly spread about the country.

Rickard provides several forms of tests to support the thesis. The first is a large-N analysis of the relation of the degree of manufacturing subsidies in a country with the interaction of the type of electoral system and the concentration of industry. The analysis shows that PR countries give fewer subsidies to manufacturing if that sector is geographically concentrated.

The second test is a case study of the wine industries in France and Austria. Here she finds that cognac growers, who are concentrated in one region of France, won subsidies, whereas in Austria, subsidies went to the markets where the wines are sold (“farm-gates”), which are spread around the country. She argues that these two outcomes differed because France uses a district-based electoral system and Austria employs proportional representation.

Within PR, Rickard codes for open/closed lists and reevaluates her large-N subsidy data (but does not attempt this while also including SMDs). Her dependent variable is subsidies as a percent of government spending, which she finds is statistically related to the interaction of open lists and industry concentration. The final empirical chapter looks at intra-country variance within Norway, which uses a closed-list system. There she shows that spending is correlated with vote margins.

This study of subsidies is provocative, because it has direct implications for institutions, and, as such, I propose some alternative theoretical propositions and raise several questions about the data that I hope will serve future studies. A first query is theoretical: a long literature agrees that legislators in PR and SMD-type systems face different incentives, and thus it is logical that they would spend differently. But it is not clear that one type would spend more than the other, because more spending would (in this simple model) always produce more votes. The key is how the money would be spent. As Rickard explains, in PR systems a party should be unconcerned about where it wins another vote, because all votes translate into seats. In an SMD system, by contrast, votes beyond 50% (or less if there are multiple parties) are wasted. Thus, those controlling the purse strings in SMD systems should use their funds judiciously, spending in places where more funds could convert seats. They may also have incentives to pay off supporters, so they cannot ignore seats where they have won. The game under PR is different, because a party should be just as happy picking up extra votes in a district where it is weak as where it is strong. If that is the case, a party in a PR system should be fine with subsidies that support concentrated industries; they are just as useful as subsidies that support industries of the same size that are spread about the country. In sum, whereas SMD systems encourage support of concentrated industries, PR systems should be indifferent. A regression analysis, therefore, might not pick up a clear relation between the two types.

The next queries are about Rickard’s data. Although studying subsidies provides a useful means to test a complex problem, the level of aggregation and limited comparisons bound the confidence of the tests. The first set of regressions looks at subsidies to manufacturing as a whole at the country level, contingent on their level of concentration. As a result, it does not allow a test among more or less concentrated industries. Intra-country and cross-sectoral tests would provide that type of analysis, but the Norway tests (chap. 6) cover just three sectors over five years (n = 15). The discussion of the wine industry in France and Austria (chap. 5) is another step in the right direction, given that it compares the concentrated growers in France with the diffuse markets in Austria. The case study, however, does not complete the implied 2 × 2 matrix that would increase confidence in the findings by showing that diffuse sections in France and concentrated sectors in Austria failed to win subsidies. Chapter 7 also leans toward the necessary intra-test by considering whether spending on manufacturing subsidies is correlated with regional vote margins. The dependent variable, however, has changed, and the test still does not differentiate among sectors. In addition, the data are annual for a variable (subsidies) that probably does not change much and only includes a period with a consistent coalition government. As such, the tests overstate the statistical power, and we do not know whether another government would reset the subsidies to fit their electoral priorities as the hypothesis suggests.

A final concern relating to the data is simply that there needs to be more descriptive information about the fascinating dependent variable. The book lacks much information about the distribution of the variable (and there is no online appendix), and it is therefore hard to grasp the substantive implications and to match findings with concrete cases. In chapter 4, Rickard explains that industry concentrations are generally quite low, with two-thirds of cases having a concentration level, measured with an entropy index, of less than 0.033. In the regression analysis, she finds that PR and SMD systems differ when the concentration rates are below that value, but not when they are between that level and 0.054. It is unclear without more understanding of these values why a party or a legislature would care about differences of this level. The book also fails to give details on the cases in the regression analysis. There is mention that the data include two decades of data and 14 countries, so perhaps the n in the analysis is 20 years of observations for each of 14 countries (which are not detailed), thus approximating the reported n in the analysis (between 169 and 227).

In sum, Spending to Win provides a very useful approach to empirically demonstrating the relation of electoral institutions and political strategies. By providing a novel and useful approach to operationalizing political spending strategies through the analysis of subsidies, the study will surely encourage future expansions and refinements.