In representative parliamentary systems, voters normally anticipate that the candidate they pick will not only address their concerns once in office, but also provide them with services and goods that only an official position in a major state institution would help secure. A large body of research has explained why freshly elected officials are therefore first and foremost expected to work for the constituents who elected them, secure new benefits for them, while preventing extant resources from being taken away from them (Fenno 1978; Cain et al. 1987; Mezey 2008, pp. 38–39). Expectations from constituents can thus run very high. More often than not, legislators are held accountable for the tangible benefits they bring to their constituencies rather than their overall legislative effectiveness or role in the scrutiny of other branches of government.

Among the legislative tools that can help an elected representative provide regular benefits to his/her constituents are district-level development funds and other “pork-barrel” spending programmes. The politics of “pork barrel” describes, in a pejorative way, the process that national-level officials use to obtain special government funds (or “pork”) to finance projects benefiting their own local constituencies. They “pass on pork” by redistributing governmental tax revenues to their home districts and, in the process, hope to build a clientele of loyal voters and win re-election to office. Criticism against distributive politics and pork barrelling programmes abounds worldwide. Pork-barrel spending indeed routinely open avenues for corruption, reinforces electoral clientelism and political patronage, encourages a considerable waste of public money, while keeping politicians away from national policymaking focus.

Yet, Myanmar has recently rediscovered the practicality and value of such programmes. In 2014, new legislation introducing a Constituency Development Fund (hereafter CDF) was passed by the Union parliament, then dominated by the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP). Once Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD) took control of the bicameral legislature after the elections held in November 2015, the new ruling party chose to continue the CDF scheme. Drawing on recent field research and interviews with elected parliamentarians, this paper will investigate initial patterns of “pork-barrel” politics in Myanmar under both the former USDP government (2014–16) and the early NLD administration (2016–17).

The paper starts with a brief review of the literature on “pork-barrel politics” and the international debates on constituency-level development funds.