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Why Do Members of Congress Vote for the Farm Bill?

Last updated on October 8, 2014

My paper with my former colleague Nick Carnes on the political economy of agricultural protection, which looks at why members of Congress vote for or against the farm bill, has just been accepted by and is now forthcoming at Food Policy.

Nick and I have been working on this since early summer 2013. The idea came to us as we were having lunch and I asked him whether the data he’d assembled for his book White Collar Government included any information about whether members of Congress had worked as farmers. We began with an interest in knowing whether having worked as a farmer drove how members of Congress vote on farm bills, but we soon expanded our analysis to also include the proportion of farmers in a member of Congress’ district as well as the amount of money she had received from agricultural political action committees. This allows us to run a horse race between competing theories for what drives agricultural protection, i.e., subsidies to farmers along with the taxes and quotas imposed on agricultural imports.

After the paper was rejected twice at other journals (complete with a referee report that compared part of our paper to a high-school term paper, no less) we decided to send this to Food Policy in October 2013. Little did I know that I was going to become an associate editor of that same journal a month later!

Here is the abstract:

It seems paradoxical that until recently, developed countries have continued subsidizing agriculture even though their agricultural sectors had been declining in relative importance since the middle of the 20th century. What drives support for agricultural protection—the broad array of subsidies to farmers and taxes and quotas imposed on agricultural imports—in developed countries? We answer this question by testing three competing hypotheses about what drives support for agricultural protection in the US: (i) legislator preferences, (ii) electoral incentives, or (iii) lobbying. Using data on the roll call votes of the members of the 106th through the 110th Congresses (1999-2009) and the scores given to each legislator by the Farm Bureau, our findings suggest that electoral incentives explain a great deal of the variation in support for agricultural protection, but that legislator preferences and lobbying might play a role, too. Moreover, legislator preferences and electoral incentives appear to be substitutes for one another. Why does Congress support agricultural protection? Because many members have electoral incentives to—and because many of those who do not still have other personal or strategic interests at stake.

You can download the accepted version of our paper here. The analysis does not establish causal relationships, but it is interesting in the sense that, to me at least, it clears up the common misconception that lobbying drives everything. What we find instead is that it looks as though the electorate mainly drives whether farm bills get passed.