Research

The Politics of Pork in the Contemporary Congress

Our current research examines the politics of congressional spending. Also based on archival research this work will centers on the appropriations process, and fleshes out the implications of our findings in Committee Assignment Politics.

Our paper presented at the 2007 American Political Science Association meeting in Chicago--"Whose Pork is it Anyway?"--used earmark request data to examine the politics of military construction projects.

Our paper presented at the 2006 Northeastern Political Science Association meeting in Boston examined the process of building support to maintain a significant chunk of spending that benefited only a handful of members in an Appropriations Committee bill.  It was titled "Building Coalitions and Protecting Pork"

Our paper for the 2005 American Political Science Association Meeting examines House Appropriations Subcommittee assignments in the Republican Congress was titled "The Politics of Republican House Appropriations Subcommittee Assignments"

"Distributive Theory Reconsidered: Federal Spending and Committee Assignments Revisited" was a first cut  at examining the relationship between committee assignments and district level expenditures (though imperfect because of the nature of the spending data that we use).

Jimmy Carter and the Water Wars

A slight detour in our research is a book manuscript titled Jimmy Carter and the Water Wars: Presidential Influence and the Politics of Pork.   The first draft of this project was presented at The Carter Presidency: Lessons for the 21st Century. Using archival documents, oral histories, and interviews with former Carter staff we examine his veto, and his successful fight in the House to sustain the veto, and the politics of the pork barrel that touched off this important battle.

Committee Assignment Politics

Our book Committee Assignment Politics in the U.S. House of Representatives was published in 2006.

Our primary quantitative data were collected by the authors from the congressional papers of Carl Albert, Tom Foley, Gerald Ford, Charles Halleck, Bob Michel, Tip O'Neill, John Rhodes, and Jim Wright. We also collected data from the papers of Tom Bevill, Hale Boggs, Lindy Boggs, David Bonior, James Burke, James Corman, Julian Dixon, Bill Frenzel, Sam Gejdensen, Martha Griffths, Frank Horton, Barbara Kennelly, Robert Lagomarsino, Bob Livingston, Sam Rayburn, Ed Roybal, and Wilbur Mills, and we have plans to visit several other collections in the coming months. This data collection effort took us more than four years (and over 40,000 combined air miles!) and has resulted in an uncommonly rich data set.

The Committee Assignment Request Data were deposited with ICPSR and are now available for researchers use.

Furthermore, we conducted extensive interviews with current and former Members of Congress, and current and former congressional staff, in support of our research. Most of these interviews were conducted in person in Washington, DC, and elsewhere in the U.S., while a few were done over the telephone. Altogether we interviewed three dozen individuals during three trips to Washington and other locations.

We have collected Senate committee requests from the Lyndon B. Johnson, Mike Mansfield, and Richard B. Russell papers, and several other Senate archives. Our data collection for Democratic members is complete from 1946-1994. Currently we are seeking access to Republican committee assignments which -- for very specific reasons -- are more difficult to locate. A paper based on these data was published in Congress and the Presidency (Spring 2006).

In addition to the research papers posted below we wrote a short and (hopefully) entertaining piece on conducting research in congressional archives titled: "Don't Have the Data? Make Them Up!" . This paper was published in PS: Political Science and Politics in April 2003.

Financial Supporters

Our research as benefited from the generous support of: The Dirksen Congressional Center and Caterpillar Foundation, The Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, The Carl Albert Center at the University of Oklahoma, The Thomas S. Foley Institute at Washington State University, the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University, The California State University at Bakersfield, California State University at Channel Islands, and The Niagara University Research Council.