The incidence of regional and metropolitan area intergovernmental relations is often explained in terms of efficiency gains for the participating jurisdictions (Stein 1990; Rusk 1993; Waste 1998; Katz 2000; Drier, Mollenkopf, and Swanstrom 2001). It is generally believed that local governments seeking to cut costs or provide a higher quality of services will look to other neighboring jurisdictions and private sector entities to partner with in the provision of goods and services. The economic rationale behind regional and intergovernmental cooperation is well understood. Not obvious are the political and professional motivations that influence decisions to cooperate and collaborate with neighboring jurisdictions.

We theorize that local officeholders view decisions to engage or not engage in intergovernmental cooperation as avenues for promoting their political careers. Two different theories that exist in the literature on intergovernmental cooperation lead to two distinctly different expectations about how intergovernmental cooperation affects electoral trajectories. In one view, local elected officials with ambition for higher office (especially higher political offices that represent a larger geography) may pursue intergovernmental relations as a way to promote themselves to a larger constituency. This view draws on the seminal work of Joseph Schlesinger on ambition theory. In a second view, intergovernmental cooperation reflects the goal of incumbents to protect themselves from electoral threats. In this view, a high incidence of intergovernmental cooperation leads to fewer, rather than more, challenges by quality challengers and is thus associated with fewer opportunities for incumbents at lower levels of government to realize their ambitions for higher office.

In this chapter we turn to the development of our subsystem thesis. The literature on policy subsystems has been undergoing something of a renaissance. In recent years, public policy research has begun portraying the relationships that frequently develop between agencies, interest organizations, and legislative committees in terms that suggest fluidity, dynamism, and openness to the larger political environment (see, e.g., Hamm, 1983; McCool, 1990; Jenkins-Smith, St. Clair, and Woods, 1991). Heclo (1978), for example, describes policy subsystems as loose issue networks (cf. Berry, 1989). Kingdon (1984) argues that we should think in terms of policy communities. Cohen (1986) describes systems of variable political control involving Congress, the president, the courts, and interest groups. Sabatier and Pelkey (1987) point to potentially competitive advocacy coalitions spanning multiple actors in a policy domain. Meier's (1985) synthesis of the regulatory literature treats subsystems as interconnected sets of dyadic linkages, which may be consensual or conflictual, between agencies, subnational units of government, legislative subcommittees, industry groups, interest advocacy groups, and assorted others. All of these views reject the classic depiction of policy subsystems as “iron triangles,” composed of informal, but durable, linkages between executive agencies, legislative committees or subcommittees, and special interest groups (Lowi, 1969; McConnell, 1966; Freeman, 1965; Cater, 1964; Truman, 1951).

Taken together, this recent work suggests that the “iron triangle” literature was seriously deficient in not recognizing the conditions under which the insularity of subsystems could be breached from the outside by the rise of new interest claimants and issues or from the inside by shifting alliances and loss of consensus.

Americans have a love–hate relationship with their government. They tell pollsters that they disapprove strongly of Congress as a whole, but vote to reelect their own members of Congress. They decry the role of special interests in influencing congressional decision making, but oppose public funding of federal campaigns. They believe that much of what the government does is unnecessary and wasteful, but demand that programs benefiting themselves be protected. The policy subsystems that we analyze in this book contribute to this ambivalence about our political system. They are viewed as insulated from popular control, self-serving, and a major contributor to the country's runaway deficits. At the same time, they are given responsibility for designing and implementing policies in response to public problems.

MYTHS ABOUT FEDERAL ASSISTANCE PROGRAMS

Given this ambivalence, it is important to separate the real problems from the mythology associated with policy subsystems. Perhaps the biggest myth is the contention that policy subsystems in general are a major contributor to the federal deficit. The fact is that a very small number of domestic programs account for virtually all of the growth in domestic spending. Figure 8.1 shows that three programs – Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid – are responsible for the vast majority of the growth in domestic spending during the 1980s. These three programs account for 85 percent of all growth in spending for domestic financial assistance programs from 1983 through 1990.

In Chapter 2, we showed that the growth in the number of distributive programs coincided with a decline in their average size. These programs were evidently attractive despite the absence of additional funding. Indeed, we argued that the attractiveness of the programs is independent of their size. A widely held thesis in the political science literature offers a possible reason for why this might be the case: the tendency for legislators to form oversized coalitions that bestow distributive projects on virtually every district represented in the legislature. The budgetary size of the projects is typically considered to be irrelevant to their desirability.

This thesis, in brief, is as follows. Formal models of legislative voting behavior have shown that legislators, when considering programs that involve geographically concentrated benefits and diffuse costs, have an incentive to form legislative coalitions far larger than simple majorities. This tendency was first characterized by Mayhew (1974) as universalism, which, he suggests, serves the desire of legislators to win reelection. Weingast (1979), Shepsle and Weingast (1981), and Weingast, Shepsle, and Johnsen (1981) identify uncertainty as to whether a legislator will be included in the final winning coalition, and thus will obtain valuable assistance in his or her reelection bid, as the primary impetus driving universalism. They argue that by ensuring every district receives some amount of federal spending, supporters of spending programs eliminate the uncertainty about the inclusion of each member of the legislature in the winning coalition.

It is an enduring belief in American politics that legislators who “bring home the bacon” are rewarded for their efforts at the ballot box. This is reflected in the attention of the political science profession, which has invested heavily in explaining and testing for a relationship between the particularized benefits legislators secure for their districts and the electoral margins with which incumbents are reelected. Mayhew (1974), who first elaborated on the logic underlying the electoral connection with distributive policy benefits, observed that “how much particularized benefits count for at the polls is extraordinarily difficult to say, but it would be hard to find a Congressman who thinks he can afford to wait around until precise information is available. The lore is that they count” (p. 57).

We argue that the lore about the relationship between benefits and electoral support contains an important element of truth, which previous research may have failed to detect due to misconceptualization or misspecified empirical tests, or both. Following Fiorina (1981a:546–51, 556), we treat the relationship between distributive benefits and electoral support as dynamic over time and conditioned by institutional, partisan, and electoral differences among individual legislators. We argue, however, that a properly conceptualized view of the electoral connection must integrate both a macroview of the behavior of legislators and a microview of the responses of voters. In this chapter we develop an argument in which not all legislators have the same incentives to utilize their positions within policy subsystems to enhance their electoral margins.

In this chapter we examine the relationship between interest groups and legislators. Our focus is how this relationship promotes support for programs by legislators. A reason that legislators may support programs is that they may benefit from the activities of interest groups that have a stake in those programs, whether or not program benefits go to their districts. Interest group contributions may serve as the functional equivalent of programmatic benefits in enhancing the electoral fortunes of legislators. We precede first with a discussion of our own explanation for the interest group–legislator finance relationship and then proceed to a review of the literature on interest groups and their influence on policy decisions. This explanation should be viewed in terms of the larger set of relationships among actors within policy subsystems. As argued earlier, agencies and legislative committees play important roles in helping interest groups overcome their collective action problems. Data collected on interest group activity with respect to nine public laws passed during the 99th and 100th Congresses are used to examine these dynamics.

THE LEGISLATOR–INTEREST GROUP FINANCE RELATIONSHIP

To understand how interest groups might operate to supplement programmatic benefits to a district, we need to consider the set of relationships among actors in the policy subsystem. Our principal thesis is that policy subsystems and their main product, program portfolios, affect the goals and objectives of each actor in the subsystem. Legislators seek reelection through the electoral support of constituents.

Agriculture

Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service

Economic Research Service

National Agricultural Statistics Service

Human Nutrition Information Service

Agricultural Marketing Service

Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service

Agricultural Cooperative Service

Food Safety and Inspection Service

Forest Service

Soil Conservation Service

Agriculture Research Service

Cooperative State Research Service

Extension Service

National Agricultural Library

Commerce

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

International Trade Administration

National Telecommunications and Information Administration

National Bureau of Standards

Defense

National Guard Bureau

Education

Office of the Secretary

Office of Assistant Secretary for Elementary and Secondary Education

Compensatory Education Programs

Office of Assistant Secretary for Post Secondary Education

Assistant Secretary for Educational Research and Improvement

Assistant Secretary for Special Education and Rehabilitative Services

Assistant Secretary for Vocational and Adult Education

State and Local Programs and Support

Energy

Office of the Secretary

Conservation and Renewable Energy

Assistant Secretary for International Affairs and Energy Emergencies

Office of Minority Economic Impact

Office of Energy Research

Office of Policy

Health and Human Services

Office of Human Development Services

Public Health Service

National Center for Health Services Research

Centers for Disease Control

food and Drug Adrninistration

Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry

Alcohol, Drug Abuse and Mental Health Administration

National Institutes of Health

Indian Health Service

Health Resources and Services Administration

Health Services Administration

Office of Refugee Resettlement

Health Standards and Quality Burcau

Housing and Urban Development

Community Planning and Development

Interior

National Park Service

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement

Geological Survey

Bureau of Reclamation

The source from which our data on the flow of federal funds to congressional districts have been constructed is the Federal Assistance Awards Data System (FAADS), which is maintained by the Bureau of the Census. As described here, we have compiled these data into a geographical data base that reports, for each domestic program and for each congressional district, the number of discrete awards, both new and ongoing, as well as the dollar value of awards. Summary tables and figures for the 1983–90 period for each congressional district are available in Bickers and Stein (1991).

FAADS is compiled by the Office of Management and Budget and maintained by the Bureau of the Census. It was established in 1981, but underwent significant evolution prior to 1983. Most important, FAADS did not identify the congressional district in which awards were made until fiscal year 1983, making it impossible to construct congressional district level figures prior to that year. From its inception, it has been available only in magnetic readable form, consisting of records that each federal agency enters by computer when the agency makes a financial assistance award to a recipient or group of recipients. In most years, the FAADS records exceed a million transactions. FAADS contains extensive information on aid awards, recipients of the aid, and the programs under which awards are made. FAADS includes most of the programs listed in the Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance, and is keyed to the same identification codes that are used in the catalog.

A common myth is that federal programs, once created, exist forever, growing unabated over time. This characterization may be more or less true for redistributive programs, but is not at all true for distributive programs. Yet distributive programs play a role in the political process independent of their size in dollars. Indeed, our argument is that there is little correlation between spending on distributive programs and their value measured in political terms. As we argue in later chapters, distributive programs are a key source of political capital for actors in policy subsystems that have a stake in the programs.

Too much of the research on the federal government has been preoccupied with expenditures. Yet not all dollars are equal. A dollar for a new bridge or dam buys something quite different than a dollar of educational assistance. A dollar of regulatory activity implies something much different than a dollar of redistribution. The point is that government does not merely spend dollars. It uses dollars to do things, to make things, and to engage in a host of disparate activities. Not all activities are well measured by counting the dollars spent.

For redistributive policies, dollars are everything. How much money and how it is allocated determine whether redistribution occurs. The zerosum quality of redistributive policies drives analysts to focus on expenditure measures. In regulatory policies there probably is some sort of correlation between program expenditures and regulatory enforcement, though the strength of this relationship doubtless is more attenuated than for redistributive policies.