In 1920, a critical number of U.S. representatives supported institutional reform that transferred their own committees' spending power to the House Appropriations Committee. Why did these legislators vote to give up their direct influence over appropriations? The choice is particularly puzzling because appropriations power offers access to distributive public policy, an important commodity for any reelection bid. In this article, we explore the logic behind this surprising decision. We find that legislators who agreed to surrender their "power of the purse" actually were acting in their electoral interests because their constituents demanded fiscal responsibility, and not pork barrel projects. We also find that legislators who voted against relinquishing appropriations jurisdiction, thereby ignoring the public's call for budgetary reforms, did so because favorable electoral circumstances gave them considerable flexibility in their roll call decisions. This evidence contributes to our understanding of the historical development of congressional institutions by highlighting and detailing their electoral origins.

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In this article, we present and test a market-based model of news content about state courts of last resort. We test our theory by examining newspaper coverage of decisions in death penalty cases. Our empirical results indicate that news elements of drama, novelty, and sensationalism influence coverage of state high courts' death penalty cases rather than traditional indicators of legal salience. News content either anywhere in a newspaper or on its front page is influenced by similar factors, but front-page coverage is more sensitive to dramatic conviction reversals and the rarity of executions in a given state. Our results suggest that traditional explanations of the relationship between crime and newsworthiness have limited impact on media attention given to state supreme courts. Media coverage of state high courts is instead associated primarily with the behavior of the court and its justices.

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