CONGRESSIONAL VOTING ON SUPERFUND - SELF-INTEREST OR IDEOLOGY

Many allege that Superfund is a pork-barrel program that serves self-interested federal legislators. An earlier empirical study found that Superfund cleanup priorities and expenditures were not dictated by congressional committee influence, but rather largely by public interest concerns. Despite this apparent denial of classic distributive politics, it is important to recognize that pork also can arise from legislators voting to expand programs when their constituents stand to benefit disproportionately. This study examines important House and Senate votes on Superfund for their correspondence to theories of congressional self-interest and ideology. On the whole, and despite its theoretical appeal as a potentially-classic pork-barrel program, congressional voting on Superfund is found to represent legislator's environmental and liberal ideologies as much as (if not more than) narrowly-defined self-interest. Along with the results of a previous study, this should be taken as evidence that Superfund has not consistently been a typical pork-barrel program, and that its rapid expansion and legislative support must be explained by other factors, including its symbolic environmental appeal.