Earmarks and Campaign Contributions in the 110th Congress

Legislative earmarks have taken center stage in the popular press in recent years as journalists, pundits, the president, and, sometimes, even legislators themselves question the economic, representational and general policy implications of this type of federal spending. Theoretical work on distributive policy making assumes that legislators garner either direct or indirect electoral benefits from this behavior but empirical findings have been mixed. In this paper we place this discussion in the context of the literature on legislative position taking by asking whether legislators use earmarks to signal to potential campaign contributors about the direction and intensity of their preferences as an additional tool in their non-roll call arsenal. We test whether this is a successful form of legislative position taking by determining whether earmarks result in campaign contributions from affected groups. Utilizing a two-stage Tobit-Tobit technique, we find a robust relationship between defense earmarks and campaign contributions from defense political action committees during the 110th Congress