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The authors are testing the patterns of geographical representation in single nationwide district closed-list PR systems, in the framework of an earlier study made by Latner and McGann (2005), who suggested that MPs mostly reside in central metropolitan areas, as well as in distant regions, to the detriment of descriptive representation of areas adjacent to the capital. In this way, spatial distance serves as an incentive for parties to nominate lists comprised mostly of candidates from metropolitan urban centres who can easily reach the mid-distance municipalities for campaigning and constituency service, but also of those candidates residing in peripheral regions in which there is some sort of political or ethno-cultural saliency, prompting the voters to prefer their local candidates over capital city politicians. Authors are offering a novel approach of measuring and comparing spatial distance to the data on representation of local administrative units and regional subdivisions of four countries (Montenegro, Netherlands, Serbia and Slovakia). While the findings indeed indicate overrepresentation of capital cities and underrepresentation of neighbouring areas, the representation of peripheral areas is not significantly pronounced and seemingly depends more on a contextual case-to-case basis than on a general pattern related to spatial distance producing political or ethno-cultural saliency.

The practice of political representatives trying to provide benefits to voters in their local communities is not new. The phenomenon is most often operationalized through financing of public works, projects, subsidies, direct transfers or social benefits, provided in order to increase the political ratings and ultimately ensure reelection. Although the practice is more pronounced in candidate-oriented electoral systems consisting of single-member districts, it can also be identified within the countries employing the proportional list system. The authors' intention is to examine a correlation between the local representation in the Serbian parliament and budgetary transfers and moreover a general level of local financing. For this purpose, data on the residence of MPs was compared with the levels of transfers, subsidies and amount of local expenditures, while the models are additionally controlled with various variables including size of municipality, development level, unemployment rate, share of elderly population, as well as other developmental and societal factors. The sample covered 145 cities and municipalities in Serbia, for a period from 2013 to 2021. The empirical results indicate that pork barrel practices are indeed present even in the environment of closed electoral lists with at-large single district, which does not create institutional incentives for the cultivation of personal vote. But even in Serbia, it seems that local politicians favor their places of residence by increasing the level of public investments. Consequently, municipalities without deputies will remain without financial benefits that parliamentary representation provides. We found that these practices are primarily accomplished through central level subsidies, but can also be identified in the amounts of local budgets and local expenditures. On the other hand, direct annual transfers from the higher levels of government are mostly fixed due to the exact legal criteria, exempting the interference of elected deputies on this particular financing mechanism.

The article is revisiting a never-concluded debate about the partisan effect on public spending. It explores the impact of the ruling parties’ ideological orientation, operationalised in a single-dimensional left-right scale, on budget expenditures in Central and Eastern Europe. The research is conducted within an expanded time series covering the complete period since the fall of one-party regimes in sixteen former socialist countries, where the issue has remained under-studied, especially in comparison with a number of similar studies focusing mostly on developed Western democracies. The findings moderately support the main hypothesis demonstrating that, although an ideology matters, there are also other more significant predictors of the spending among political, economic or other contextual variables related to a specific transitional framework of the countries in question. The same conclusion applies to the total consumption, as well as to the examined budget segments of social transfers and education, while the environmental spending seems to be completely unrelated to the partisan variable.