Decentralizing Pork: Congressional Roll‐Call Voting, Decentralized Administration, and Distributive Politics

Abstract

Congress packages pork‐barrel spending in complicated proposals that belie theories of distributive politics. We theorize that roll‐call voting on such bills depends on grant programs' administrative centralization, party ties with presidents or home‐state governors, and differences in geographic representation between chambers. Analyzing votes between 1973 and 2010 using a within‐legislator strategy reveals that House members are less likely to support decentralized spending when they are copartisans with presidents, while senators support decentralization regardless of such party ties. When House members or senators share affiliation with only governors or with neither chief executive, the likelihood of support rises with decentralization.

The Pivotal and Distributive Politics of Senate‐Confirmed Appointee Vacancies

“…Both presidents and Senators deploy tangible benefits to remind voters of the advantages of having a senior representative wellpositioned to bring home the pork (Stein and Bickers 1997). If agencies have any discretion over that pork, as some have argued (e.g., Napolio 2021), then having leadership that is proximate to the preferences of a given party should help determine the relative level and type of outlays (see Bertelli and Grose 2011;Bertelli and McCann 2018). Senators make strategic decisions to increase or decrease the flow of awards according to their reading of their constituents' expectations.…”