"Bringing Home the Bacon": Distributive Politics in China's National People's Congress

While many researchers have extensively studied the distributive politics of legislatures in liberal democracies, only a few have examined the role of those legislatures outside of liberal democracies in the geographical distribution of public resources, and their findings have been inconsistent. Based on an original dataset of 75,797 deputy proposals of China's National People's Congress from 2008 to 2017, this article first reveals that when deputies from a particular province submitted more proposals about constituency interests, it usually resulted in more central fiscal transfer payments to that province. However, a province whose relevant proposals were signed by more deputies usually received fewer fiscal resources. Deputy proposals can influence governmental policymaking to a certain extent, but deputies are discouraged from mobilizing bottom-up collective action. This study further indicates whether and how legislatures outside liberal democracies influence public resource distribution and sheds light on the limitation of such influence.