Does the Median Voter or Special Interests Determine State Highway Expenditures? Recent Evidence

Abstract Using cross-sectional data from 50 states of the United States and the District of Columbia for two different time periods, this paper examines the degree to which special interests or the median voter determine state highway expenditures. In addition to finding that previous estimates of the determinants of state highway expenditures are robust, we find that that special interests that were important in 1984 were no longer significant nearly 20 years later. Like the previous literature, we conclude that the reduced form median voter model performs well in explaining state highway expenditures.