More federal legislators lead to more resources for their constituencies: Evidence from exogenous differences in seat allocations

•Exploit exogenous differences in district magnitude induced by German electoral system.•Analyze causal effect of district magnitude on allocation of federal resources.•More legislators per constituency increase the number of federal civil servants in constituency.•Effect of district magnitude on allocation of federal resources is large and statistically robust.•Evidence for relevance of common pool problems and the law of 1/n. Electoral district magnitude varies across German electoral constituencies and over legislative periods due to Germany's electoral system. The number of seats in parliament per constituency is effectively random. This setting permits us to investigate institutionally driven variations in the magnitude of individual constituencies on the allocation of federal resources to these constituencies. We analyze the causal effect of having more than one federal legislator per constituency on federal government resources by exploiting information from 1,379 constituencies from 1998 to 2017. More federal legislators per constituency lead to statistically significantly more employment of federal civil servants. The size of the effect is large and corresponds to about 3.5% of average employment once a constituency is represented by additional legislators from party lists. Robustness tests support our results. Further evidence points to heterogeneity of the effect: Constituencies represented by additional legislators who are experienced and who are members of larger, competing parties obtain more federal resources. [Display omitted]