Party and Committee in Distributive Politics: Evidence from Defense Spending

Recent studies of the domestic distribution of military procurement expenditures and representation on congressional defense committees support the traditional committee-centered distributive theory of congressional policymaking in a manner consistent with the assumption that Congress is organized to produce gains from exchange among legislators with diverse interests via intercommittee logrolling. This paper compares the committee-centered distributive theory to a party-centered distributive theory. Analysis of a multiequation model using pooled time-series data on the distribution of military procurement expenditures and defense committee representation among states from 1963 to 1989 supports a party-centered version of the distributive theory.