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Until 2009, the lower chamber of the Czech Parliament, the Chamber of Deputies, practiced an annual tradition of earmarking when discussing the state budget. MPs used this opportunity to exercise their influence and assign state funding to specific regions of their interest. Among those who succeeded in this effort were primarily members of the parliamen-tary Committee on the Budget, while other MPs had to struggle to pull strings so that other legislators would support their causes. Although the MPs expressed ambitious financial goals, the final result of earmarking had to be fiscally neutral given that the overall income and expendi-tures of the budget were already approved and further change was out of the question. To help this game run, the Ministry of Finance, which prepared the annual budget proposal, often overestimated the proposed expenditures so that MPs could find opportunities to funnel money to localities they aimed to support. After 2009, this earmarking tradition in the Czech Parliament came to a close, probably due to widespread criticism of such practices and the need for substantial cuts and austerity measures in response to the financial crisis at that time. However, the change was rather formal than real. In subsequent years the earmarks were substituted by grants distributed by the ministries of the central govern-ment. In other words, while the playground had changed, the rules and strategies remained largely untouched (cf. Hána 2013). Before the 2016 general elections in Slovakia, a group of researchers conducted a series of focus groups with citizens and voters (Baboš et al. 2016). The main aim was to perform an in-depth analysis of how voters were evaluating various political, social, and economic issues before the upcoming elections. One of the topics the participants of the focus groups discussed was corruption and its impact. The results revealed an inter-esting story. In general, the participants condemned any sign of ‘high level’ corruption, i.e., corrupt behaviour on the national level such as unlawful use of public resources or misuse of public tenders to provide benefits to the sponsors of political parties. On the other hand, after switching the topic to political patronage and corruption at the local level, the tone of the participants changed. Although they still disagreed with such practices from a moral perspective, they appreciated these practices by local governments, providing they led to either individual benefits for the participants or they were beneficial for the whole local area. Direct experience with receiving benefits thus triggered a positive evaluation of such biased spending, despite its generally maligned character.