Perpetuating the Pork Barrel: Policy Subsystems and American Democracy

Stein and Bickers explore the policy subsystems—links among members of Congress, interest groups, government agencies—that blanket the American political landscape. They employ a new data base detailing federal outlays to Congressional districts for each federal program to examine four myths about the impact of policy subsystems on American government: that policy subsystems are a major contributor to the federal deficit, that federal programs grow and rarely die, that subsystem actors seek...