Congress and the national endowment for the arts: Institutional patterns and arts funding, 1965–1994

This article describes congressional handling of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) longitudinally, linking particularly bicameral differenes and institutional reform within Congress to arts funding. It argues that the House and Senate have approached the arts very differently because of the distinctive character of the two institutions; that sharp funding increases for the NEA coincided with the decentralization of political power on Capitol Hill; that creative use of rules within the House sustained arts funding at the time that it was most vulnerable politically; that fiscal issues have been accompanied (if not actually supplanted) by cultural concerns for a subset of members; and, that conflict over arts funding on Capitol Hill has followed regular patterns that are now in jeopardy with a new Republican majority.