Can electoral systems determine how particularistic spending is distributed in developing countries? The ways in which legislators seek benefits for their constituencies, have been the subject of longstanding debate in political science. While the discussion has broadly focused on the theoretical consequences of electoral systems on legislators’ behaviour, little evidence has accounted for these alleged effects, especially in developing country settings. This paper focuses on particularistic spending in Honduras, providing a natural experiment to test different relevant hypotheses found in the literature. Since the early 1980s Honduras used a closed-list ballot with single-member and plurinominal districts electoral system. In 2004 the country moved to an open ballot structure keeping the same range of district magnitude. The data allows me to differentiate spending allocation that uses national funding from that which uses international funding. I hypothesize that spending per capita that comes from national sources, when the closed-list PR is in use, will tend to increase with district magnitude, while with the open-list PR, an increase of district magnitude is related to lower spending per capita. For internationally funded projects I expect that spending per capita will tend to increase in hand with the incentives the electoral system provides to seek a personal vote.
