Distributive Politics and Party Participation in the U.S. House

• Author: Scott R. Meinke
• DOI: 10.1177/1532673X17719506
• Published date: 01 July 2018
• Date: 01 July 2018
• Subject Matter: Articles

719506APRXXX10.1177/1532673X17719506American Politics ResearchMeinke
research-article2017
Article
American Politics Research
2018, Vol. 46(4) 671 –694
Distributive Politics and
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the U.S. House
Scott R. Meinke1
Abstract
A range of research shows that distributive spending is allocated
disproportionately to members in positions of power or who contribute to
collective efforts. In this article, I ask whether House members who participate
in their party caucus’ internal organizations enjoy earmarking advantages either
as a direct benefit or by avoiding earmarking losses that are usually associated
with declining electoral vulnerability. Adding new data on party involvement
to several earmarking data sets, I find mixed evidence. Democratic party
participants enjoyed somewhat better outcomes in the 1990s, but this result
does not hold in other contexts. Evidence from the traditional pork barrel
area of transportation earmarks supports the expectation that the electoral
vulnerability effect is confined to nonparticipants, but this pattern does not
appear for Appropriations earmarks in the 2000s. The results suggest that
contributions to party goals can relate to distributive outcomes but that the
effects vary by issue and party context.
Keywords
earmarks, congressional parties, party leadership, distributive politics
Despite the popularity of antipork positions, earmarking activity was alive
and well under both Republican and Democratic House majorities in the
1990s and 2000s. Just as the public opposed earmarks but favored members
1Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA, USA
Corresponding Author:
Scott R. Meinke, Department of Political Science, Bucknell University, One Dent Drive,
Lewisburg, PA 17837, USA.
Email: smeinke@bucknell.edu

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American Politics Research 46(4)
seeking spending for their own district (Clement, 2012), members of Congress
argued against the evils of pork even as they sought out and received increas-
ing amounts of it (Frisch & Kelly, 2011). Such distributive benefits, of course,
can be distributed universally to benefit virtually all members, or they can be
distributed selectively to provide incentives, payoffs, or rewards for members
who make certain decisions or join in particular legislative actions (Evans,
2004). And, whereas scholars have sometimes seen a universalistic tendency
in distributive benefits (Mayhew, 1974), recent research focused on distribu-
tive spending has found considerable evidence for more selective allocation.
Distributive rewards accrue to members of key standing committees
(Engstrom & Vanberg, 2010), to Appropriations subcommittee leaders or
members (Berry & Fowler, 2016; Clemens, Crespin, & Finocchiaro, 2015),
and to swing members who join a majority coalition on major legislation
(Evans, 2004). Electorally vulnerable members also enjoy selective distribu-
tive benefits (Bickers & Stein, 1996), which in turn can be effective tools for
reelection (Lazarus, Glas, & Barbieri, 2012; Lazarus & Reilly, 2010).
Much of the recent research on distributive politics generally—and ear-
marking in particular—recognizes the importance of party in the allocation
of distributive benefits. Members of the majority party (Balla, Lawrence,
Maltzman, & Sigelman, 2002; Carsey & Rundquist, 1999; Engstrom &
Vanberg, 2010), the president’s partisans (Berry, Burden, & Howell, 2010),
and top leaders of the House parties (Clemens, Crespin, & Finocchiaro, 2015)
all appear to enjoy particular benefits. Majority-party members who are dis-
advantaged by the party’s policy positions also receive compensation in the
form of distributive dollars (Carroll & Kim, 2010). In addition, some evi-
dence indicates that the majority party conditions the electoral vulnerability
effect, channeling more earmarks to its own vulnerable members but not to
those in the minority party (Lazarus, 2009).
If the parties can exert some control over the allocation of distributive
benefits, then they may in turn use that control as a tool for rewarding party
members who serve the party’s collective policy or electoral goals. Top party
leaders may wish to reward members for a range of party-supporting behav-
ior (Pearson, 2015), including high levels of voting support (Cann & Sidman,
2011), redistribution of campaign funds to the party, or serving the party’s
needs as a member of the whip system or a party committee. The last fac-
tor—party participation—is especially important because it represents ser-
vice to the party that may be rewarded, and it could also position members to
develop advantages in the earmark process. This article investigates this pos-
sibility, asking whether service in House party organizations pays off when
House members seek earmarks. In the last several decades, between one third
and one half of each party caucus has contributed to the party’s everyday

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673
work as whips or members of party committees such as the Republican
Steering Committee or the Democratic National Congressional Committee.1
The work of these organizations is important for the party’s collective goals—
they shape decisions about the party’s electoral and policy strategy while
helping the leadership collect information, communicate with constituencies,
and build support (Evans & Grandy, 2009; Kolodny, 1998; Meinke, 2016;
Sinclair, 1995). Members who advance party objectives through this partici-
pation also benefit individually in pursuing their own goals (Heberlig &
Larson, 2007; Price, 2004; Sinclair, 1995). Do members who participate
actively in their party caucus also do better than their peers in the earmark
allocation process?
I answer this question using a range of earmarking data from the 1990s
and 2000s. I first review the extensive literature on earmarking and develop
an argument about the possible connections between party participation and
earmark allocation. Participating members may simply enjoy better earmark
outcomes, but the relationship could also be more complex as multiple con-
siderations affect the party’s approach to earmarks. In particular, I examine
the effect of electoral vulnerability. Although less vulnerable members are
usually disadvantaged in earmarks relative to their more at-risk colleagues,
members who actively participate in the caucus may offset this effect. In
either case, party leadership participation offers several paths to these
improved earmark outcomes: the leadership may independently reward
active members with better outcomes, and members (such as the electorally
secure) who might otherwise receive weaker earmark results might strategi-
cally participate to receive such rewards. In addition, participating members
may simply gain influence and/or information that leads to greater success in
the earmarking process. The research presented here cannot mediate between
these plausible causal mechanisms, but instead takes a first step by examin-
ing associations between participation and earmark patterns. I test for the
direct effect and conditional vulnerability effect by reanalyzing and extend-
ing five prior studies on House earmarks. I find some limited evidence that
participation in party organizations was associated with better earmark out-
comes for Democrats in 1990s transportation and higher education earmarks,
but there is no evidence of this direct effect in Appropriations earmark data
sets from the late 2000s. I find that Republican and Democratic members
outside of the leadership at two different points in time were subject to a sig-
nificant electoral vulnerability effect in the typical pork barrel realm of trans-
portation earmarks, but this effect was not significant for those who
participated in the party’s leadership organizations. However, this differential
pattern for the vulnerability effect does not extend to several other earmark
data sets. Overall, the evidence is modest but it points to the potential value

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American Politics Research 46(4)
of party leadership participation to rank-and-file members, and it highlights
the importance of understanding earmarking patterns across multiple issue
areas.
Allocating Distributive Benefits in Congress
Contemporary research on distributive benefits shows that such outcomes do
not follow a universalistic pattern. Instead, institutional position, electoral
factors, partisanship, demand, and institutional/procedural influences all
appear to have a measurable effect on a state or district’s share of benefits.2
One of the most consistent findings in this literature is that members’ institu-
tional positions in the authorization and appropriations process affect their
allocations, particularly for key members of the chamber’s Appropriations
committee. Members holding an “agenda-setting position receive a dispro-
portionate share of the earmark largesse,” according to Engstrom and Vanberg
(2010), p. 970, who find that Appropriations Committee membership in the
House and in the Senate is associated with a greater number of earmarks and
a higher dollar value on total earmarks (see also Lazarus & Steigerwalt,
2009). Other work focused on policy-specific pork has found similar com-
mittee-leader effects for Appropriations (Balla et al., 2002) and for
Transportation and Infrastructure (Lee, 2003). At the subcommittee level,
Clemens,...