Pork Barrel Politics and General Interest Legislation

Abstract

The argument of this book is that one important strategy by which policy coalition leaders create legislative majorities for controversial general interest legislation is to buy legislators' votes, one by one, favor by favor. Doing so not only helps leaders to unite their party; it also can draw members of the other party away from their own caucus. Where attainment of a secure majority on the merits seems doubtful, distributive benefits provide the extra margin of support to compensate for pressures that otherwise might persuade members not to vote for such a bill. This strategy is particularly interesting for its use of the sort of policy that is most reviled by observers of Congress – pork barrel policy – to pass the type that is most admired – general interest policy. Before proceeding to a discussion of the process of acquiring votes with distributive benefits, it is worthwhile to elaborate on the definition of general interest legislation. In Chapter 1, I defined such legislation as broad-based measures that affect the whole nation or a large segment thereof. This definition of general interest legislation is somewhat similar to Douglas Arnold's definition of general benefits. Arnold requires that in order to be general in their impact, policies must “fall uniformly on members of society” (Arnold 1990, p. 26). Subsumed by this definition is breadth of impact: Such policies obviously affect everyone.