Andrew Sidman - Pork Barrel Politics: How Government Spending Determines Elections in a Polarized Era

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Pork Barrel Politics

Pork Barrel Politics

How Government Spending Determines Elections in a Polarized Era

ANDREW H. SIDMAN

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York

Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
cup.columbia.edu
Copyright 2019 Columbia University Press
All rights reserved
E-ISBN 978-0-231-55040-6

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Sidman, Andrew H., author.
Title: Pork barrel politics: how government spending determines elections in a polarized era / Andrew H. Sidman.
Description: New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018058411| ISBN 9780231193580 (cloth: alk. paper) | ISBN 9780231193597 (pbk.: alk. paper) | ISBN 9780231550406 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: United States. CongressElections. | United States. CongressAppropriations and expenditures. | Government spending policyUnited States. | Polarization (Social sciences)Political aspectsUnited States.
Classification: LCC JK1976 .S58 2019 | DDC 324.973dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018058411

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Cover image: Getty Images Chee Siong Teh/EyeEm

For Barbara and Jerry

Contents

1
Incumbents and Pork Barrel Politics

2
Pursuing the Pork Barrel

3
An Electoral History of the Pork Barrel

4
Attitudes, Voting, and the Pork Barrel

5
Challenges from Within the Party

6
General-Election Challengers and Campaigns

7
Election Outcomes

THE GENESIS OF THIS BOOK stretches back far further than the three years it took to research and write it to a dissertation defended more than a decade ago. That work, also on the pork barrel and House elections, was written several years too early. Partisan effects of the pork barrel were my emphasis there, as was an ideological basis for these effects. While I believe the dissertation was well written, hindsight has shown me that the empirical examination was too narrow and my sense of the importance of developing political trends too underdeveloped. In 2006, as I researched my dissertation, the scholarly world was expanding our knowledge about the polarization that now firmly grips American political life. My academic life after defense would be consumed by other projects, but I would return to the pork barrel from time to time. Through some of this research, through teaching classes on public opinion and voting, and in trying to make sense of American politics over the past several years, I found myself engrossed in this literature on polarization. Ideas built around what I had read about the historical pork barrel and contemporary accounts of the electoral effects of distributive politics began to take concrete shape. The result is an argument that places the pork barrel in what I believe is its correct context in American politicsas an issue. As with any issue, voters develop meaningful preferences over the pork barrel and, I argue, these preferences are based in ideology. Polarization has largely been defined, in both elites and the mass public, by partisan ideological sorting, increased ideological consistency, and intense partisan behavior. The pork barrel provokes stronger ideological reactions because everything provokes stronger ideological reactions. The partisan effects of the pork barrel, so inconsistent throughout much of the literature, are sharply focused in an era described by some observers as the most polarized since the end of the Civil War.

As many authors before me have recognized, the completion of any work, especially a book, is nearly impossible without help. This work is the product of more than three years of research, three years that have been filled with personal and professional happenings that give life meaning but make it difficult to sit down and write. I am grateful for all of the help I received getting these ideas onto the printed page. Given the development of this work from my aforementioned dissertation, I am indebted to the members of my dissertation committee: my adviser Scott Basinger, Ren Lindstdt, Shana Rose, and Jeffrey Segal. I returned regularly to their feedback in the early stages of this research, and I am grateful for their insights as the work progressed. Various incarnations of the ideas set forth here have been presented in a number of forums and academic conferences. I thank the many participants and discussants who have given me feedback on my work, especially Kenneth Bickers, Steven Greene, Peter Hanson, and Sean Theriault. I am especially thankful for Jeff Cohen and Maxwell Mak, one my mentor and guide in this profession and the other my longtime colleague and coauthor. Both have been good friends and have provided great feedback on my thoughts and ideas.

I am also grateful for the assistance of my editor at Columbia University Press, Stephen Wesley. He efficiently and expertly guided me through the review process, securing comments from two anonymous reviewers, to whom I also give thanks, that greatly improved this work. Thanks are also due to Kathryn Jorge at Columbia University Press, Ben Kolstad at Cenveo Publisher Services, and their respective teams for the excellent copyediting and typesetting of my manuscript. In addition to those in the broader academic world, I received lots of support from my home institution, including funding for this work that was provided by a grant from the Office for the Advancement of Research at John Jay College.

Last, but certainly not least, all of my endeavors have benefited more than I could recount here from a wonderfully supportive family. My wife, Nicole, has been more than I deserve in every way, and I doubt I could have completed this work without her support. My children, Lily and James, have been endless sources of joy and needed distractions. I am thankful for my in-laws, Donna (mother), Camille (grandmother), and Kristin (sister), for all of their help, giving me more time to write. Finally, I am grateful for my parents, Barbara and Jerry. They were amazing parents, the fiercest advocates of my work, and they devoted their all to my education. It is to them that this book is dedicated.

ON MARCH 10, 2010, House Appropriations Committee chair David Obey, a Democrat, proclaimed that the Appropriation Committee would not consider any earmarks directed to for-profit companies requested for the 2011 budget. In a remarkable step, House Republicans decided the following day to ban earmark requests from their conference altogether (Clarke and Epstein 2010).The quick answer is that the high level of polarization in recent politics is necessary for there to be general, systematic costs of pork barreling for Republicans.

This is not a book about Republicans and the pork barrel, but Republicans do receive more attention in the discussion. The simple reason is that distributive politics has had stronger and more complex relationships with House election outcomes for Republicans than for Democrats in the recent era. In part, this may be due to the lopsided nature of polarization itself: Republicans in Congress have become more extreme than Democrats (Bonica et al. 2015), as have Republican voters (Mann 2015). The first aim of this work is to understand the interplay between the pork barrel and polarization in electoral politics. In all of the work on distributive politics and elections, I have yet to come across a single work that examines the role of polarization. Undoubtedly, this is a consequence of data availability; some of the best data on the pork barrel exist for a period of relatively low polarization. It is only recently, considering the full period for which these data exist, that polarization has exhibited sufficient variation to draw meaningful conclusions about its effects. In studying the relationship between pork, polarization, and House elections, this book advances the study of distributive-electoral politics in two additional ways.

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