Determinants of success in congressional passage of science and technology research legislation

This dissertation addresses the legislative process and decision-making by Congress in the area of science and technology research legislation. With all the public attention given to scientific research issues (i.e. morality questions swirling around fetal tissue research), there is a lack of systematic political science work on Congress' legislative involvement in this policy area. Much of the present political science literature is limited to historical case studies that do not provide scholars with generalizable findings about science and technology research decision-making over many projects and policy areas. They also leave a large source of potential data untapped---research proposals that proceed part of the way through the legislative process, but do not become public law. To make proper use of such cases, specific projects are categorized by the level of "success" they reach in the legislative process, instead of defining "success" through subjective evaluations of the usefulness of research or final technological products that are created. This is a major deviation from previous political science work in the area of science policy.;Theoretically-informed hypotheses about the success of science research proposals in Congress have been developed and are tested through the qualitative analysis of six case studies from the issue areas of health and energy. The unit of analysis in each case study is a legislative bill containing one specific scientific research project.;One significant finding suggests that the "success" of a scientific research bill in the legislative process is greatly enhanced by the capacity of some members of Congress to translate their close personal experiences with the bill's subject matter or the bill's sponsor into support for its passage. Furthermore, contrary to the suppositions of scholars who have linked the government's involvement in scientific research to pork barrel benefits distributed to individual states or congressional districts, the success of a scientific research bill seems to be unrelated to the potential allocation of benefits. Consequently, the legislative process surrounding science research legislation appears to be largely a political one, but not in ways normally attributed to consideration of these types of issues.