Pork versus Policy: Experimental Evidence on Majoritarian Bargaining with Real-World Consequences
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Pork barrel politics has long attracted controversy; difficult to prove and vigorously denied by those accused of it, the practice is nevertheless defended by others who argue that pork facilitates compromise. We design a novel field-in-the-lab experiment to study how legislators bargain over pork and real-world policy. We first introduce a new incentivized method to measure subjects’ ideological peak preferences and attitudinal strength. Subjects then bargain over a two-dimensional agenda: a donation to a political interest group and the division of a sum of money. Consistent with our theoretical model, we find that subjects trade off monetary and policy considerations. Subjects who are in the ideological majority and who prefer status quo policies extract better bargains, but minorities gain most from the possibility of compromise afforded by two dimensions. Finally, we show that artificially induced preferences fail to fully capture the bargaining dynamics observed using naturally occurring preferences.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it