Partisan Payoffs: Distributive Politics and Party Participation in the US House

Abstract

A range of research on earmarking shows that this kind of distributive spending is allocated not according to universalism but rather in ways that advantage particular positions of power or contributions to collective efforts. Other work makes clear that party leaders use tools at their disposal to reward members who serve the party’s goals. In this paper, I ask whether House party leaders use earmarks as a selective benefit for members who participate in the party’s internal organizations, including the whip systems, policy committees, and steering committees. Adding new data on participation to five existing models of earmark allocation, I test (1) whether party organization members receive more earmarks than nonparticipants and (2) whether participation can help members to avoid the decline in earmark allocations that is associated with greater electoral security. The evidence for the first hypothesis is weak, but the second hypothesis finds strong support, at least in the Democratic caucus. In most of the models, Democratic participants in leadership organizations experienced no significant electoral vulnerability effect on earmark allocations even as their nonparticipating counterparts did. The results suggest that contributing to collective party goals can alter the usual patterns of earmark allocation for members.