Rewards for Local Partisans. The Pork Barrel Politics in Slovakia.

In 2004 Slovakia introduced a new policy aimed to financially support local projects in various areas (e.g. education, culture, infrastructure). Every year the national government decides which municipalities gain this help and by doing so the executive is bound to no control. The aim of the paper, which maps the period of 2004-2014, is to analyze if this decision process is done on a neutral basis or whether a partisan bias plays a role here. The findings indicate a strong evidence of the latter and show that the chances of municipalities to gain the subsidy from the government are substantially higher if their mayors belong to the governmental parties. The paper also reveals that this policy of rewards is connected to all relevant political parties as new cabinets follow the line of the previous ones.