Parties and countries highly diverge in the regionalization of their electorates. There are countries where the electorate is highly nationalized while other display very asymmetric patterns of vote support and electoral behaviour. This paper analyses the consequences of this in terms of public spending. The argument is that when a party has its voters geographically dispersed, it will be interested in providing policies focused on individual characteristics, such as their social group, that do not discriminate geographically. However, when a party has its voters geographically concentrated, there might be other policy instruments that will imply a more direct distribution to the voters a party is interested in. This argument is tested by analysing the social spending in 20 OECD democracies since 1970. It is shown that, regardless of the electoral system, countries with nationalized electorates have broader Welfare States and provide higher levels of social policies, while countries with more regionalized electorates show higher levels of pork barrel. Diverse robustness tests support this claim.
