Swamps
A Paradox of Political Reform: Shadow Interests in the U.S. States
James Strickland
American Politics Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Laws that restrict and disclose the actions of lobbyists are attempts to protect elected officials from undue influence and preserve public trust in lawmaking processes. Imposing too many campaign finance restrictions and reporting requirements on registered interest groups, however, might discourage them from registering. I use an original data set compiled from several decades of lobbyist lists to determine whether these laws suppress registration rates among interest groups. More limits on campaign finance activities, but not heavier reporting burdens, are shown to be associated with depressed registration of interest groups. As unregistered interests are not subject to these regulations, this presents a paradox of political reform. Reformers can either restrict the campaign finance activities of organized interests or disclose their lobbying activities more fully, but not both. I provide estimated totals of registered interest groups given a set of laws that maximizes compliance.
Is Justice Blind? Evidence from Federal Corruption Convictions
Lewis Davis & Kenneth White
Brown University Working Paper, July 2018
Abstract:
Are federal prosecutors influenced by partisan political concerns? We examine this question by analyzing forty years of federal corruption convictions at the state and federal district levels. Our key finding is that state-level corruption convictions fall by 8% in years when a state’s governor is of the same party as the U.S. president, a measure of state-federal political alignment. This effect is more precisely estimated for Republican than Democratic administrations. Our findings are robust to controls for state and national political environments, presidential fixed effects, election cycles, party tenure in the executive branch, and the changes in Honest Services law. In addition, we conduct a placebo test, finding that state-federal political alignment does not affect the total number of federal criminal convictions. Finally, we find no evidence that local-federal political alignment matters for corruption convictions at the district level. Our results are consistent with a significant level of partisan prosecutorial bias on the part of U.S. Attorneys.
Gender Stereotypes and the Policy Priorities of Women in Congress
Mary Atkinson & Jason Windett
Political Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
Scholars find that women who run for Congress are just as likely to win as men are, yet women face considerable challenges related to their sex on the campaign trail. Women are more likely to face challengers than men are, the challengers they face are typically more qualified, and gender stereotypes paint women as less able to handle important issues like defense and foreign affairs. We examine how women succeed in the face of these obstacle, arguing that women are successful, in part, because they craft large, diverse legislative agendas that include bills on a mix of topics. These topics include district interests, women’s interests, and the masculine issues on which women are disadvantaged. We believe this balancing strategy allows women to develop reputations for competence on a wide range of issues, which in turn, helps them deter electoral challengers. We test our hypotheses by analyzing a comprehensive database of all bills introduced in the U.S. House between 1963 and 2009. We find that female MCs propose more bills, spread across more issues, than do men. Further, the topics of the bills women sponsor span a range of women’s issues, masculine issues, and gender-neutral topics — giving support to the idea that women balance their legislative portfolios. Finally, we examine the electoral benefits to women of this strategy by analyzing rates of challenger emergence in Congressional races. We find that women must introduce twice as much legislation as men to see the probability of challenger emergence decrease to a level that is indistinguishable from that of men. The added effort and staff hours female MCs typically devote to crafting legislation, vis-à-vis male MCs, only serves to put them on equal footing with men. It does not give them an advantage.
How Responsive Are Legislators to Policy Information? Evidence from a Field Experiment in a State Legislature
Adam Zelizer
Legislative Studies Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Theories of legislative committees, lobbying, and cue‐taking assume information affects legislators' support for policy alternatives. However, there is little direct, empirical evidence to support this foundational assumption about legislative behavior. This article reports results from a field experiment in which state legislators were randomly assigned to receive policy research about pending proposals. Results show that policy information increased aggregate cosponsorship by 60% above baseline rates. For one bill covered critically, information diminished cosponsorship and roll‐call voting support. Results are broadly consistent with information signaling models' predictions about the importance of information to position taking.
Fake News, Information Herds, Cascades and Economic Knowledge
Lazarina Butkovich et al.
Caltech Working Paper, July 2018
Abstract:
The paper addresses the issue of “fake news” through a well-known and widely studied experiment that illustrates possible uses of economics and game theory for understanding the phenomenon. Public news is viewed as an aggregation of decentralized pieces of valuable information about complex events. Success of news systems rests on accumulated investment in trust in news sources. By contrast, fake news involves cases in which news source reliability is not known. The experiment demonstrates how fake news can destroy both the investment in trust and also the benefits that successful news systems provide.
Governed by Experience: Political Careers and Party Loyalty in the Senate
Alex Keena & Misty Knight-Finley
Congress & the Presidency, Spring 2018, Pages 20-40
Abstract:
In this article, we study the U.S. Senate to understand how legislators' previous experiences in elected office influence their political behavior. We posit that, as a result of their experiences in office, former governors in the Senate are less partisan than their colleagues. We code the political jobs held by senators between 1983 and 2015 and analyze the effects of these careers on party loyalty in Senate floor votes. We find that gubernatorial service is associated with a 7–8% decrease in Party Unity. We test several hypotheses for the observed “governor effect” and find that, relative to their colleagues, former governors are supported by donor networks that are less ideologically extreme. We conclude that the unique experiences associated with serving as governor, along with the personalized nature of governors' electoral support coalitions, affect a senator's relationship with the party. Ultimately, our analysis illuminates how personal attributes, such as prior experience in elected office, can inform the study of legislative behavior.
Does Media Coverage Drive Public Support for UKIP or Does Public Support for UKIP Drive Media Coverage?
Justin Murphy & Daniel Devine
British Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Previous research suggests media attention may increase support for populist right-wing parties, but extant evidence is mostly limited to proportional representation systems in which such an effect would be most likely. At the same time, in the United Kingdom’s first-past-the-post system, an ongoing political and regulatory debate revolves around whether the media give disproportionate coverage to the populist right-wing UK Independence Party (UKIP). This study uses a mixed-methods research design to investigate the causal dynamics of UKIP support and media coverage as an especially valuable case. Vector autoregression, using monthly, aggregate time-series data from January 2004 to April 2017, provides new evidence consistent with a model in which media coverage drives party support, but not vice versa. The article identifies key periods in which stagnating or declining support for UKIP is followed by increases in media coverage and subsequent increases in public support. The findings show that media coverage may drive public support for right-wing populist parties in a substantively non-trivial fashion that is irreducible to previous levels of public support, even in a national institutional environment least supportive of such an effect. The findings have implications for political debates in the UK and potentially other liberal democracies.
Inferring Roll‐Call Scores from Campaign Contributions Using Supervised Machine Learning
Adam Bonica
American Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article develops a generalized supervised learning methodology for inferring roll‐call scores from campaign contribution data. Rather than use unsupervised methods to recover a latent dimension that best explains patterns in giving, donation patterns are instead mapped onto a target measure of legislative voting behavior. Supervised models significantly outperform alternative measures of ideology in predicting legislative voting behavior. Fundraising prior to entering office provides a highly informative signal about future voting behavior. Impressively, forecasts based on fundraising as a nonincumbent predict future voting behavior as accurately as in‐sample forecasts based on votes cast during a legislator's first 2 years in Congress. The combined results demonstrate campaign contributions are powerful predictors of roll‐call voting behavior and resolve an ongoing debate as to whether contribution data successfully distinguish between members of the same party.
Random interactions in the Chamber: Legislators' behavior and political distance
Alessandro Saia
Journal of Public Economics, August 2018, Pages 225-240
Abstract:
I investigate the role of social interaction among Members of Parliament (MPs) and the impact of such interaction on the political distance between parties. Using the random allocation of seats in the Icelandic Parliament, I find that MP's voting and speech behaviors are affected by the behavior of legislators seated nearby. I also show that greater (random) exposure to MPs from different parties ultimately reduces the political distance between parties. Similar evidence is found using historical data for the U.S. House of Representatives, by exploiting the introduction of a lottery mechanism to determine desk assignments in 1845. I argue that random seating arrangements could constitute a low-cost way of reducing differences within the political arena.
Clueless Politicians: On Policymaker Incentives for Information Acquisition in a Model of Lobbying
Christopher Cotton & Cheng Li
Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, August 2018, Pages 425–456
Abstract:
We develop a model of policymaking in which a politician decides how much expertise to acquire or how informed to become about issues before interest groups (IGs) engage in monetary lobbying. For a range of issues, the policymaker (PM) prefers to remain less informed about policy than may be socially optimal, even when acquiring expertise or better information is costless. Such a strategy leads to more-intense lobbying competition and larger political contributions. We identify a novel benefit of campaign finance reform, showing how contribution limits decrease the incentives that PMs have to remain under-informed on the issues on which they vote. The analysis goes on to allow for a fully general information strategy in the spirit of Bayesian Persuasion. In the case of symmetric IGs, a PM’s optimal strategy maximizes the probability he is “on the fence” when deciding between policies.
How Internal Constraints Shape Interest Group Activities: Evidence from Access-Seeking PACs
Zhao Li
American Political Science Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Interest groups contribute much less to campaigns than legally allowed. Consequently, prevailing theories infer these contributions must yield minimal returns. I argue constraints on PAC fundraising may also explain why interest groups give little. I illuminate one such constraint: access-seeking PACs rely on voluntary donations from affiliated individuals (e.g., employees), and these PACs alienate donors with partisan preferences when giving to the opposite party. First, difference-in-differences analysis of real giving shows donors withhold donations to access-seeking PACs when PACs contribute to out-partisan politicians. Next, an original survey of corporate PAC donors demonstrates they know how their PACs allocate contributions across parties, and replicates the observational study in an experiment. Donors’ partisanship thus limits access-seeking PACs’ fundraising and influence. This provides a new perspective on why there is little interest group money in elections, and has broad implications for how partisan preferences and other internal constraints shape interest group strategy.
Can’t Buy Them Love: How Party Culture among Donors Contributes to the Party Gap in Women’s Representation
Melody Crowder-Meyer & Rosalyn Cooperman
Journal of Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Why do Democratic women seek and hold office more frequently than Republican women? We use an original survey of donors to party campaign committees and women’s political action committees to answer this question. We theorize that the intense policy demanders in each party have built party cultures with substantively different orientations toward women’s political involvement. These cultures shape party elites’ behavior and influence responsiveness to a newly defined policy-demander group — women’s representation policy demanders (WRPDs) — whose primary goal is to increase women’s political representation. We reveal that Democratic elites’ political activity and financial contributions are significantly more motivated by WRPD concerns than are Republicans. We also show that WRPDs like EMILY’s List and Susan B. Anthony List are far more integrated into Democratic than Republican party coalitions. Thus, we reveal both the continued existence of distinct party cultures and the consequences of this distinction for women’s representation.
The Impact of Citizens United on Large Corporations and Their Employees
Wendy Hansen & Michael Rocca
Political Research Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
The goal of this research is to determine whether the Supreme Court’s landmark 2010 Citizens United ruling changed the contribution strategies of employees of major corporations. Using an original dataset of campaign contributions by employees of Fortune 500 companies, we analyze the contribution strategies of these individuals in the 2008 and 2012 presidential election cycles. Overall, our results suggest three important conclusions. First, Citizens United did not alter Fortune 500 employees’ contribution patterns to traditional political committees. However, the emergence of Super political action committees (PAC) in 2012 may have pulled employees’ contributions from 527 groups, at least in the short term. Second, we find large differences in contributions across resources, and the differences become even more dramatic after Citizens United when CEOs contributed millions to Super PACs. Finally, Fortune 500 employee contributions to traditional political committees still outweigh Super PAC contributions in both numbers and amount. And, importantly, employees of the world’s largest corporations were not the driving force behind the increase in spending after Citizens United.
Interest Group Influence and the Two Faces of Power
Leslie Finger
American Politics Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study revives the “two faces of power” conceptualization to consider whether common interest group measures are valid proxies for interest group strength. The “two faces of power” model proposes that power enables not just influence on decisions, but also influence from controlling the agenda. Using the case of state-level teachers’ unions, I test whether measures of a group’s ability to set the agenda (the second face of power) have a stronger relationship with policy outcomes and stakeholder perceptions of influence than do measures of a group’s engagement with legislators (the first face of power). I find support for this proposition. The second face, operationalized with union membership rates, is associated with policy proposal, policy passage, and stakeholder perceptions of influence, while open contestation, operationalized with campaign contributions, is not. This suggests that operationalizations of power based on surface-level measures such as campaign contributions may not accurately capture interest group influence.
Special Interest Influence Under Direct Versus Representative Democracy
John Matsusaka
University of Southern California Working Paper, July 2018
Abstract:
The ability of economic interest groups to influence policy is a common theme in economics and political science. Most theories posit that interest group power arises from the ability to influence elected or appointed government officials through vote-buying, lobbying, or revolving doors; that is, by exploiting the representative part of democracy. This raises the question: does special interest influence decline when policy is chosen using direct democracy, without involvement of representatives? An analysis of the content of the universe of state-level ballot initiatives during 1904-2017 reveals that business interests have been worse off as a result of initiatives across major industrial groups. An examination of all large contributions to ballot measure campaigns in California during 2000-2016 reveals that corporate and business interests were usually on the defensive with initiatives, and were much less likely to gain favorable legislation from citizen-initiated proposals than from proposals that originate in the legislature. The evidence suggests that economic interest groups have less influence under direct than representative democracy.
Formal Authority, Persuasive Power, and Effectiveness in State Legislatures
Barry Edwards
State Politics & Policy Quarterly, September 2018, Pages 324-346
Abstract:
What makes some lawmakers more effective than others is a central question in American politics. Recent research has emphasized the role of informal, persuasive leadership, but this research has focused almost exclusively on Congress, so it is unclear whether this approach to lawmaking is generally effective. Analysis of state legislatures is hampered by the lack of a theoretically sound and practically feasible measure of legislative effectiveness. I offer a solution to the primary problem with traditional hit rates. I apply this approach to North Carolina legislators and show my effectiveness estimates correspond with expert evaluations. I then examine recent terms of the Michigan, Georgia, and North Carolina legislatures to evaluate the relative importance of formal and informal powers at the state level. I hypothesize and find that informal, persuasive leadership is not effective in state legislatures where lawmaking is better explained by formal, hierarchical authority.