Abstract. How does politics affect, and possibly distort, how resources are allocated? I show that where the federal government provides public goods and financial assistance depends not only on who has power within Congress but also on the characteristics of their constituents. In a federal system like the United States, the central government provides resources by allocating grants to subnational governments based on demographic characteristics. Thus, to maximize funding for their states, members of Congress must also distribute funding to states with similar characteristics. Using panel data on education spending and a difference-in-differences design, I demonstrate that grants disproportionately benefit states represented by Senate committee chairs, but this benefit spills over to similar states. However, I find no evidence of committee influence over grants in the House. These findings contribute to our understanding of distributive politics and shed light on the consequences of allocating resources within a federal system.
Abstract. In the United States, state and local governments receive over $700 billion annually in federal grants, yet relatively little is known about how Congress designs these programs. I formalize a theory of congressional bargaining over grants and test the theory using an original dataset of Senate amendments. The results suggest that congressional rules and political considerations shape, and at times distort, federal grant programs. While grant programs may be intended to improve education or provide health care, I find that members of Congress treat these programs as opportunities to procure more funding for their constituents. Further, I show how coalitions are shaped by the status quo policy and the distribution of population, poverty, and other demographic characteristics across states. These results have important implications for our understanding of the policymaking process and who benefits from federal programs.
(Replication materials available here.)
Abstract. When estimating the political determinants of the federal budget, scholars face a choice between using measures of funding and measures of spending as their outcome of interest. We examine the consequences of this choice. In particular, we argue that spending outcomes may serve as a poor test of the research questions scholars seek to answer, since spending data conflate competing budgetary influences, are downstream measures of the appropriations that originated them, and induce measurement error. To test our claim, we compare the spending data used in a recent study (Berry and Fowler 2016: American Journal of Political Science 60 (3): 692–708) with an original data set of military construction appropriations. While an analysis of the spending data produces a null result, the same analysis using the appropriations data provides strong evidence that legislators use their committee positions to distribute pork. Our findings have broad implications for studies that use measures of spending in the congressional and presidency literatures.
(Replication materials available here.)
Abstract. Congress has experienced an increase in dysfunction, gridlock and polarization over the past several decades. While no doubt there are numerous causes behind these maladies, we hypothesize that the politicization of congressional capacity plays an important role. By this, we mean that the funding and staffing of congressional committees has become increasingly political, instead of being based primarily upon expertise or need. This paper explores changes in committee capacity in two ways. We first examine the broader context of committee resource allocation through several decades of House and Senate disbursement reports, exploring how political considerations may influence the allocation of budget and personnel resources within Congress. Then, we propose a novel data set that uses House and Senate telephone directories to track the employment and movement within Congress of all House and Senate staffers from 1977 to 2018. We present initial results from a subset of these data and note evidence of emerging trends.