Allocative claims and pork barrel politics

Political strategies are shaped by electoral institutions and incentives. There is a large literature on pork barrel politics in single-member districts (SMD), but understanding the institutional effects that shape the incentives for pork requires comparison within the same system. The German Mixed-Member Electoral system offers an ideal institutional setup, but official data on pork is not available. Instead, we focus on the use of pork references as an electoral strategy, adapting credit-claiming theory to textual analysis of candidates’ social media posts. Using supervised machine learning on Facebook posts by candidates in the 2017 and 2021 federal election campaign period, we fine-tune a BERT classifier on 1000 manually coded posts to identify pork references (F1: 0.82). Our results demonstrate that incumbents, particularly district incumbents and those who outperform their national party’s vote share, are significantly more likely to emphasize pork in their communication. Moreover, candidates are more likely to use pork references if their competitors within the district employ similar strategies, and when electoral competition in the district is high. Our findings imply that particularistic logic exists beyond SMDs and can be shaped by the internal specificities of more complex incentive systems.