HIS ARTICLE examines the distribution of total and pro-T grammatic spending among congressional districts and advances JL two major hypotheses based upon recent trends in congressional behavior and policy-making to explain some significant part of those allocations. Its thesis suggests that altered patterns of influence in what has been described as the &dquo;New Congress&dquo; have produced sometimes contradictory tendencies to allocate spending both universally and redistributively among congressional districts. Perceptible linkages have thus been forged between congressional processes and comprehensive district allocations. The empirical conclusions are both theoretically reinforcing and novel, since past scholarship has failed to establish meaningful connections between comprehensive (and often programmatic) district spending and either the internal organization of congressional power or the socioeconomic characteristics of congressional districts.Below, a brief overview of prior studies in this field is offered, followed by a presentation of the propositions explored in the subsequent empirical analysis of district spending.
In recent years, several writers using the new political economy or public choice approach to political analysis have sought to improve our understanding of bureaus, bureaucrats and governments and, in some cases, to suggest ways in which their behavior might be “improved” in the public interest. The public choice approach to public administration rejects the so-called sociological or traditional political science approaches with their alleged Parsonian, Weberian, Marxist, historical, institutional or organic biases and limitations in favor of an individualistic, deductive, noninstitutional analysis, which is thought to be more cogent, more fertile in testable hypotheses, more genuinely theoretical and more relevant in terms of reform. Here the view is taken that the pathos of the public choice approach to public administration consists in this: that public choice advocates by virtue of their methodology are fated to “lose” consistently on questions of administrative reform and prescriptive efficacy, even while contributing, potentially importantly, to the scientific understanding of nonmarket, usually public, organizations or “bureaus.”
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