Pork barrel

Budget allocations that an individual legislator directs, rather than an agency allocating them against a published criterion. The Philippine version was the Priority Development Assistance Fund.

Why the term belongs in a lesson about a household selling a vote: it is the same loop, seen from the other end. Contingent loyalty at the bottom is only useful to a politician who has something contingent to hand out at the top, and discretionary budget is the cleanest supply of it. Money that must be spent against a criterion cannot be aimed. Money at a person’s discretion can.

The PDAF scam was exposed by Nancy C. Carvajal in the Philippine Daily Inquirer in July 2013, centred on businesswoman Janet Lim-Napoles, with roughly ten billion pesos estimated defrauded. Nationwide protests followed in August, and the Supreme Court struck the congressional pork barrel down as unconstitutional later that year in Belgica v. Ochoa.

That last fact is worth holding onto in a level about whether anything ever changes. Whatever happened afterward, a Philippine institution constrained the Philippine legislature.

Source: Reporting by Nancy C. Carvajal in the Philippine Daily Inquirer, July 2013, and the Supreme Court decision in Belgica v. Ochoa. The case number and exact decision date have not been confirmed against the Supreme Court E-Library for this course and are therefore not stated here. Confirm at the SC E-Library before the case is cited on camera. Background and the estimated amounts are carried in this course’s culture research map, Part 2.

First used in: 2.3 · Why a decent person sells a vote