While I am no expert in political economy, it seems intuitive that voters are happy if their representatives manage to provide federal money for local investment projects. But how large is the effect in terms of additional votes in future elections?

In his great article Stimulating the Vote: ARRA Road Spending and Vote Share (AEJ Policy, 2019) Emiliano Huet-Vaughn studies this question for road infrastructure investments financed by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

If you want to empirically explore this topic yourself, you can take a look at this nice interactive RTutor problem set that Philipp Klotz wrote as part of his Bachelor thesis at Ulm University. Besides learning about political economy, you can also hone your skills in R.

Here is a screenshot:

You can test the problem set online on shinyapps.io

https://philippklotz.shinyapps.io/RTutorPublicSpendingVotingBehavior

or locally install the problem set, by following the installation guide at the problem set’s Github repository:

https://github.com/PhilippKlotz/RTutorPublicSpendingVotingBehavior

If you want to learn more about RTutor, try out other problem sets, or create a problem set yourself, take a look at the Github page

https://github.com/skranz/RTutor

or at the documentation

https://skranz.github.io/RTutor