Examining Congressional Earmarks and Higher Education Institution Lobbying Using a Difference-in-Differences Approach

• In Event: The Rise of Partisanship in Higher Education Policymaking

Abstract

There is no shortage of political science literature on the subjects of earmarks and interest group activity (De Figuerido & Silverman, 2006; Lazarus, 2009) However, the bulk of political science research in higher education focuses on higher education institutions as recipients, rather than antecedents, of political action – mostly with respect to the political and institutional determinants of university appropriations (Lowry, 2001; McLendon, Hearn, & Doyle, 2009; Ness & Tandberg, 2013; Okunade, 2004; Payne, 2003).

Universities are interest groups, however, and engage in political action. One of their main avenues for political activity is lobbying, yet few studies in the past quarter-century have examined higher education lobbyists. Those that have researched lobbying have assumed lobbyists’ main goal was to attain earmark funding from Congress (Cook, 1998; De Figueiredo & Silverman, 2006; McMillen, 2010). All of those studies, however, are almost a decade out of date – none of them take into account a 2011 Congressional ban on earmarks. Six years after the ban, institutions still have lobbyists; but how have their lobbying outfits changed? This paper attempts to fill that gap in the literature by examining university expenditures on lobbying and total federal funding received in the years prior-to and after the Congressional earmark ban. Through reports from the US House of Representatives and Senate, federal budget data, and data from IPEDS, the paper uses a difference-in-differences method to determine the impact of the 2011 Congressional earmark ban by treating earmark-seeking institutions as a treatment group and those institutions with self-imposed bans on seeking earmarks prior to 2011 as control institutions. The paper concludes that the partisan introduction of the earmark ban resulted in an increase in postsecondary institution expenditures on certain kinds of lobbying, but a decrease in overall levels of federal funding to regional comprehensive and non-elite research universities.

The discussion section of the paper examines the ways in which earmarks may have contributed to funding institutions that are traditionally underserved in competitive federal research grant programs and addresses the policy implications of potential ties between earmarks and equity in higher education.

Author

• Christopher Marsicano, Vanderbilt University Peabody College of Education and Human Development