Organized Interests and the Politics of Federal Discretionary Grants.

Despite their importance in theories of distributive spending, interest groups and other private and public organizations are largely absent from empirical research on the allocation of federal spending to subnational jurisdictions. We find that organized interests are significant determinants of the allocation of federal discretionary grants to states for 1991 through 1998 across seven policy areas. In contrast, we find only meager effects for supply-side variables suggested by the literature. We conjecture that supply-side effects are highly contingent on political circumstances and the type of spending being analyzed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]