Jeffrey Lazarus

Different houses: the distribution of earmarks in the U.S. House and Senate

Nearly all studies of pork-barrel politics in the U.S. Congress focus on the House, biasing our conception of how politics influences federal spending and skewing our attention toward factors that are active in the House. This article highlights differences between the Senate and House in how pork is allocated. We identify four important differences between the House and Senate, generate hypotheses regarding how each difference should influence the distribution of pork projects, and test these hypotheses using data from earmarks in the Appropriations bills passed by the two chambers for fiscal year 2008. The results support three of our four hypotheses, suggesting that senators are driven by different motivations than House members. These results imply that theoretical accounts of pork-barrel spending need to account for these interchamber differences. Our findings also highlight how studies of legislative behavior, more generally, need to account for important differences in legislative structure and organization.

The Electoral Benefits of Distributive Spending

Prior studies search for evidence that distributive spending influences Congress members’ vote shares but find limited evidence. The authors argue that Democratic and Republican members each benefit from different types of distributive projects. Democrats benefit from delivering spending projects (what most people think of as “pork”) to their constituents, while many Republican members benefit from delivering contingent liabilities (in which the federal treasury underwrites a private entity’s financial risk). Empirical tests using data from U.S. House elections between 1984 and 2002 generally confirm these hypotheses, with one exception: only Republicans in relatively conservative districts gain from contingent liabilities. This result is further explored in the text.

Buying In: Testing the Rational Model of Candidate Entry

Most studies of candidate entry focus on the general election challenger, ignoring all other candidates. This limits the study of entry in two ways. First, results are not generalizable. Variables which have been found to correlate with the presence of an experienced challenger in the general election might not correlate with amateur entry or the entry of incumbent-party challengers. Second, existing tests of the “Rational Model of Candidate Entry” are weak tests. Studies regularly find a correlation between the presence of experienced challengers in the general election and the outpartys prospects of winning, but this is not a sufficient condition of the model. Amateurs are also more likely to run when the probability of winning is high, and if this correlation is as strong as that between experienced challenger entry and the prospects of winning, this would violate a prediction of the model. I address both issues by separately estimating the entry of experienced challengers and amateurs. Two primary results follow. First, evidence indicates strong support for the rational model. Second, correlates of entry are different for different types of challengers.

Issue Salience and Bill Introduction in the House and Senate

I propose that many if not most bills introduced in the House and Senate represent electoral position taking on the part of members. Thousands of bills are introduced every year, only a fraction of which are passed into law, much less seriously considered in the chamber. Moreover, bills are very good position-taking devices in that they can appear to voters to be a credible step in the electoral process. I search for electoral motivations by examining the content of the bills members introduce. For five different policy areas, and in both the House and the Senate, I find strong correlations between indicators of issue salience in members’ districts and the number of bills the member introduces within the policy area. In addition, in the House the relationship between salience and bill introduction is strongest among vulnerable members, although in the Senate vulnerability does not influence the relationship.

Earmarks and Elections to the U.S. House of Representatives

Popular treatments of earmarks abound with allegations that members of Congress use them to aid their reelection campaigns, but the academic literature has yet to examine whether earmarking influences elections. To begin to fill this void, we search for relationships between earmarking and several facets of electoral competition and outcomes in the 2008 and 2010 House elections. There are three principal findings. First, in both election years, active earmarkers faced weaker primary election competition than other members. Second, in 2008 there was a positive correlation between earmarking and campaign receipts. Third, both of these correlations exist only among Democrats. These findings suggest that earmarks critics might be correct in charging that members, particularly Democrats, benefit from the earmarks they place into spending bills.

The Unintended Consequences of Congressional Action: Judicial Conviction Rates after Congressional Sentencing Reform

The Sentencing Reform Act of 1984 created the United States Sentencing Commission, which had the responsibility to promulgate sentencing guidelines. These guidelines created a range of determinate sentences for all categories of federal offenses and were binding on all federal judges. In a curious aftermath of legislation designed to toughen the response of courts to crime, scholars have noticed that federal judges’ conviction rates have fallen since the 1980s (Leipold 2004). This unexpected trend raises the possibility that the outcome of the Sentencing Act is opposite of what Congress intended. When faced with mandatory sentencing guidelines, judges sometimes try cases in which they believe the defendant to be guilty, but the legally mandated sentence is too harsh given the circumstances. In these cases, judges may choose to acquit. Since these defendants would have been convicted in the absence of guidelines, aggregate conviction rates should be lower when guidelines are in effect than otherwise. We test these hypotheses with data on federal bench trials from 1970 to 2005. We find that federal judges’ conviction rates have fallen substantially and that the trend is attributable, at least in part, to the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984 and the resulting binding sentencing guidelines. We conclude that although the act allowed Congress to appear “tough on crime” to voters, the substantive result of the legislation was decidedly not tough on crime.