Testing the Parochial Hypothesis: Congress and the Strategic Defense Initiative

Abstract

Conventional wisdom holds that members of Congress vote the economic interests of their constituencies on defense issues. Previous studies for the most part have failed to find evidence of parochial voting, but these studies are open to a variety of methodological criticisms. This paper reexamines the parochial hypothesis by analyzing congressional voting on the Strategic Defense Initiative. Even though the methodological problems of earlier studies are addressed and constituency benefit is measured in several different ways, this study finds little evidence of parochialism. Moreover, like previous studies this analysis finds that members' general defense views best predict voting. The persistent finding that ideology and not economics explains defense voting in Congress suggests the need to develop our understanding of the connection between the policy views of individual members and legislative behavior