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

Abstract

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.”