Cardinals or Clerics? Congressional Committees and the Distribution of Pork

Abstract

Journalistic and academic accounts of Congress suggest that important committee positions allow members to procure more federal funds for their constituents, but existing evidence on this topic is limited in scope and has failed to distinguish the effects of committee membership from selection onto committees. We bring together decades of data on federal outlays and congressional committee and subcommittee assignments to provide a comprehensive analysis of committee positions and distributive politics across all policy domains. Using a within-member research design, we find that seats on key committees produce little additional spending. The chairs of the Appropriations subcommittees-the so called "cardinals" of Congress-are an exception to the rule. These leadership positions do generate more funding for constituents, but only from programs under the jurisdiction of their subcommittee. Our results paint a new picture of distributive politics and call for a reexamination of its canonical theories.

How Do Interest Groups Seek Access to Committees?

“…For the design to be valid, legislators who switch onto committees of interest must not be trending differently from comparison legislators; that is, had these legislators not switched onto these committees, the over-time change in their campaign receipts needs to be the same as the change we observe for the control legislators. The previous work cited above-in particular, Romer and Snyder (1994), Knight (2005), Berry and Fowler (2016a), and Berry and Fowler (2016b)-supports the validity of this assumption. More importantly, we validate it directly for our sample in several ways below.…”

“…This literature includes Romer and Snyder (1994) and Knight (2005). Most recently, Berry and Fowler (2016a) use an almost identical difference-in-differences design in the U.S. House to explore the effects of committee service on the provision of pork at the district level. Grimmer and Powell (2016) pursue a similar strategy in the U.S. House, but they focus specifically on cases of committee exile.…”

Decentralizing Pork: Congressional Roll‐Call Voting, Decentralized Administration, and Distributive Politics

“…Majority-party status in the Senate and sharing a partisan identity with the president have been found to be associated with gaining more dollars for a district (Albouy 2013;Bertelli and Grose 2009;Hudak 2014;Kriner and Reeves 2012;Larcinese, Rizzo, and Testa 2006). Inconsistent evidence of positive association exists for party, committee assignments, and seniority (e.g., Berry and Fowler 2016;Bickers and Stein 2004;Levitt and Poterba 1999).…”

“…Using correlated random effects statistical models that account for unobservable attributes of legislators, we analyze a unique data set of 30,005 coded provisions and associated roll‐call votes in the House and Senate from 199 major laws enacted during the 93d to 111th Congresses (1973–2010). Within‐member designs such as ours are common in the contemporary literature on pork‐barrel politics (Alexander, Berry, and Howell ; Berry and Fowler ). Beyond ideology, committee membership, seniority, prior electoral margins, and other characteristics that have been found to be significant in studies of pork‐barrel politics (see Grose , 202–03), legislators represent different groups of constituents, which exert different pressures on their votes, suggesting the importance of legislator‐level designs to account for this heterogeneity.…”

“… Berry and Fowler () attempt to deal with this issue by lagging distribution by one year. Various studies utilize annual federal outlays to the states and localities or compilations of appropriations demarcated as earmarks (e.g., Bertelli and Grose ; Knight ).…”