Political Analysis Advance Access originally published online on February 12, 2008
Political Analysis 2008 16(3):235-249; doi:10.1093/pan/mpm038
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Pass the Pork: Measuring Legislator Shares in Congress
Department of Politics, Princeton University, Corwin Hall, Princeton, NJ 08544
e-mail: blauderd{at}princeton.edu
Linear regression models are frequently used to analyze distributive politics in the U.S. Congress; however, authors have used a variety of specifications with different implicit assumptions about how bicameralism shapes legislative bargaining. I derive a model that describes district or state spending authorizations as the aggregation of spending secured by multiple legislators working on behalf of overlapping constituencies. This bicameral shares model allows the disaggregation of House and Senate influence through simultaneous estimation of the relative bargaining power of the two chambers and the advantages that accrue to legislators holding partisan, committee, and other relevant affiliations. In the 2005 transportation bill, the model better predicts the functional form of small state advantage than recently employed specifications in the literature.
Author's note: Coding the earmark data by place and county was completed by Taxpayers for Common Sense, which released it to me for this project. I am especially indebted to Chris Laumann for his assistance in programming the algorithm for matching location names with congressional districts and to Frances Lee for sharing her transportation earmark data. Chris Achen, Doug Arnold, Brandice Canes-Wrone, Kosuke Imai, Nolan McCarty, Jasjeet Sekhon, Aaron Strauss, and several anonymous reviewers provided helpful suggestions.