The Reciprocal Relationship between State Defense Interest and Committee Representation in Congress.

Does prior representation of a state on a Congressional defense committee lead to higher levels of per capita defense contracts, or do higher levels of prior per capita contract awards to a state increase its probability of being represented on a defense committee? To solve this puzzle, the authors estimate a cross-lagged three-equation model on data from all fifty states from 1963 to 1989 using maximum likelihood within LISREL. They find a substantial reciprocal but nonconfounding relationship between representation and the allocation of benefits for the House, but not for the Senate. Thus, for the House, this more appropriate model of distributive politics in Congress supports both the committee-induced benefits hypothesis and the recruitment hypothesis. Further, the paper elaborates on how this reciprocal relationship plays out over time. Copyright 1999 by Kluwer Academic Publishers