Barry Rundquist

The Growth of the Seniority System in the U.S. House of Representatives

Popular discussions of the internal management of the U.S. House of Representatives in the present era generally give great weight to the ubiquity and arbitrariness of the seniority system as a significant determinant of outcomes there. Careful attention to the scholarly literature, however, should long since have modified this view. For it appears that except for relatively unimportant matters such as the allocation of office space on Capitol Hill, the criterion of seniority is generally intermingled in House decision-making with a great many other crite ria of choice, and the business of choosing is not automatic, but remains in the hands of persons having some considerable discretion. This, apparently, is the case with respect to such decisions as the allocation of Capitol Hill patronage, the initial assignment of Representatives to committees, the distribution of responsibilities within committees, and the choice of party leaders. The one important area in which seniority seems to play a role of overwhelming significance is in the matter of succession to the chairmanship of committees; this is in turn governed by the custom (not a formal rule) of seniority that guarantees members reappointment to committees at the opening of each new Congress, in rank order of committee service. It is the growth of this method of selecting committee chairmen in the House that is the subject of this paper.

Party and Committee in Distributive Politics: Evidence from Defense Spending

Recent studies of the domestic distribution of military procurement expenditures and representation on congressional defense committees support the traditional committee-centered distributive theory of congressional policymaking in a manner consistent with the assumption that Congress is organized to produce gains from exchange among legislators with diverse interests via intercommittee logrolling. This paper compares the committee-centered distributive theory to a party-centered distributive theory. Analysis of a multiequation model using pooled time-series data on the distribution of military procurement expenditures and defense committee representation among states from 1963 to 1989 supports a party-centered version of the distributive theory.

On Testing a Military Industrial Complex Theory

he relationship between business and government in t capitalist societies is one of the most often discussed and seldom analyzed problems in American social science. Despite repeated admonitions for economists to learn more politics (e.g., Stigler, 1973) and political scientists to learn more about business (e.g., Dahl, 1959), good explanations of business/government relations remain few and far between. I

The reciprocal relationship between state defense interest and committee representation in Congress

Does prior representation of a state on a Congressional defense committee lead to higher levels of per capita defense contracts, or do higher levels of prior per capita contract awards to a state increase its probability of being represented on a defense committee? To solve this puzzle, we estimate a cross-lagged three-equation model on data from all 50 states from 1963 to 1989 using maximum likelihood within LISREL. We find a substantial reciprocal but non-confounding relationship between representation and the allocation of benefits for the House, but not for the Senate. Thus, for the House, this more appropriate model of distributive politics in Congress supports both the committee-induced benefits hypothesis and the recruitment hypothesis. Further, the paper elaborates on how this reciprocal relationship plays out over time.

Modeling State Representation On Defense Committees in Congress, 1959-1989

Since World War II, why have defense committees in Congress tended to represent some states rather than others? To address this question we use a variation of two-stage least squares (2SLS) to analyze the effects of each states share of prime military contracts, military payrolls, delegation size, and legislator ideology on representation on the House and Senate Armed Services Committees and the Appropriations Subcommittees of the Department of Defense. We find that during the period 1959-1989 defense committees have been dominated by large ideologically conservative states that received the largest shares of defense contracts and payrolls. The only exception is Democrats on these committees, who did not tend to overrepre sent states with above average levels of defense contracts. These findings correct earlier studies that have stressed the influence of only some of these factors (ideology or payrolls) in models of defense committee membership.