Reflections on Carol F. Goss's 1972 Article, “Military Committee Membership and Defense-related Benefits in the House of Representatives”

Political science in the 1970s was influenced by the Vietnam War and its aftermath. Many scholars were concerned with the failure to end the war and the rising levels of defense spending in the face of pressing domestic needs. Only a dozen years earlier, President Dwight Eisenhower warned about the excessive power of the "military-industrial complex." As the Vietnam War was winding down, many Americans had a lingering suspicion that military spending was as much about economic benefits at home as the assertion of American power abroad. Also by the early 1970s, studies of Congress were changing theoretically and methodologically. By the 1970s, congressional scholars were using more sophisticated quantitative methods and beginning to use instrumental rationality as a basis of theory. All of these trends are reflected in the article published by Carol F. Goss in June of 1972 titled, "Military Committee Membership and Defense-related Benefits in the House of Representatives." Keywords: Congress; committees; defense spending; pork barrel Political science in the 1970s was influenced by the Vietnam War and its aftermath. Many scholars were concerned with the failure to end the war and the rising levels of defense spending in the face of pressing domestic needs. Only a dozen years earlier, President Dwight Elsenhower warned about the excessive power of the "military-industrial complex." As the Vietnam War was winding down, many Americans had a lingering suspicion that military spending was as much about economic benefits at home as the assertion of American power abroad. Also by the early 1970s, studies of Congress were changing theoretically and methodologically. The historical, legalistic, early studies of Congress had morphed into sociological approaches in the 1950s and 1960s, focusing on norms and sanctions, reward systems, and institutionalization. By the 1970s, congressional scholars were using more sophisticated quantitative methods and beginning to use instrumental rationality as a basis of theory. All of these trends are reflected in the article published by Carol F. Goss in June of 1972, titled "Military Committee Membership and Defense-related Benefits in the House of Representatives," in Western Political Quarterly, now Political Research Quarterly. Distributive politics was by no means discovered in the 1970s. From the time of the very first Rivers and Harbors legislation emerging from the Congress, conventional wisdom held that members acted to provide tangible benefits-pork barrel-to their district constituents. Nicholas Masters argued in 1961 that committee assignments were based on how a member could be placed to best serve bis or her district. In the late 1960s, journalists Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson (1969) argued that members of the armed services committees received disproportionate spending from military bases and defense contracts (pp. 270-72). A look around at the major military bases and booming defense industries located in the district of then House Armed Services Committee chair L. Mendel Rivers (D-South Carolina) certainly provided anecdotal evidence of pork barrel politics and its relationship to the military-industrial complex. Several scholars, including Carol Goss, wanted to go beyond the anecdotal evidence and test a set of hypotheses linking members' institutional position in the House of Representatives to distributive outcomes in congressional districts. Several earlier studies had tried to examine the link between military spending by state or district and voting behavior (Cobb 1969; Gray and Gregory 1968). Neither was able to find much in terms of significant correlation. Perhaps the most prominent study of this era was Bruce Russett's (1970) What Price Vigilance? Russen found a correlation between "hawkish" voting in the Senate and military spending by state but no link between defense contracts and voting behavior. Following the publication of Russett's book, Carol Goss pursued these questions relating to representation by examining the linkage between spending and institutional position. …