Interest groups, campaign contributions, and probabilistic voting

Public Choice ◽  
1987 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-139 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Austen-Smith
Keyword(s):  
Interest Groups ◽  
Campaign Contributions ◽  
Probabilistic Voting

scholarly journals The Effects of Voting Costs on the Democratic Process and Public Finances

2015 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 141-171 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roland Hodler ◽  
Simon Luechinger ◽  
Alois Stutzer
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Interest Groups ◽  
Political Knowledge ◽  
Campaign Contributions ◽  
Special Interest Groups ◽  
Democratic Process ◽  
Probabilistic Voting ◽  
Average Education ◽  
Swiss Cantons ◽  
Welfare Expenditures

Increasing the attractiveness of voting is often seen as a remedy for unequal participation and the influence of special-interest groups on public policy. However, lower voting costs may also bring less informed citizens to the poll, thereby inviting efforts to sway these voters. We substantiate this argument in a probabilistic voting model with campaign contributions. In an empirical analysis for the 26 Swiss cantons, we find that lower voting costs due to postal voting are related to higher turnout, lower average education and political knowledge of participants as well as lower government welfare expenditures and lower business taxation. (JEL D72, H25, H75, I20, I38)

Wahlkampffinanzierung und Demokratie in den USA

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jörg Hebenstreit
Keyword(s):  
Interest Groups ◽  
Political System ◽  
Campaign Contributions ◽  
The Political ◽  
Election Campaigns ◽  
Empirical Methods ◽  
Electoral Success ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Campaign Financing ◽  
Overall Functioning

US election campaigns have always attracted enormous amounts of money. But when the Supreme Court ruled in 2010 that bans on donations from corporations, interest groups and individuals were unconstitutional, it marked nothing less than a watershed moment in US campaign financing. But what are the consequences of unlimited campaign contributions: Can elections, as is often claimed, in fact be bought so that the candidate with the most money always wins? What effects do election campaigns worth billions of dollars have on citizens’ trust and participation, but also on the overall functioning of the political system? This book deals with these and other questions, in particular with the help of quantitative empirical methods. It appears that although money is a precondition for electoral success, it is not automatically a deciding factor. Nevertheless, campaign money can also undermine the proper functioning of US democracy in other places.

The (Sometimes Surprising) Consequences of Societally Unrepresentative Contributors on Legislative Responsiveness

2004 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Bailey
Keyword(s):  
Social Welfare ◽  
Interest Groups ◽  
Computational Methods ◽  
Campaign Contributions ◽  
Formal Models ◽  
Conventional View ◽  
Multiple Interest ◽  
Issue Dimensions

The conventional view of private campaign contributions is that they distort policy to the detriment of society. Formal models consistent with such views, however, are based on restrictive assumptions about the nature of campaigns, interest groups and policy dimensionality. This paper relaxes those assumptions and allows for informative campaigns, multiple interest groups and multiple issue dimensions. It uses analytical and computational methods to demonstrate that private campaign contributions from societally unrepresentative contributors can, under reasonable conditions, improve social welfare. Multidimensionality is important because politicians need to be responsive on salient issues to prevent opponents from raising money based on less salient issues and using the money to publicize positions on salient issues.

scholarly journals How Much Can the U.S. Congress Resist Political Money? A Quantitative Assessment

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-59 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Ferguson ◽  
Paul Jorgensen ◽  
Jie Chen
Keyword(s):  
Interest Groups ◽  
House Of Representatives ◽  
Political Party ◽  
Quantitative Assessment ◽  
Campaign Contributions ◽  
Time Varying ◽  
Panel Analysis ◽  
Organized Interest ◽  
Push Out ◽  
The U.S

The extent to which governments can resist pressures from organized interest groups, and especially from finance, is a perennial source of controversy. This paper tackles this classic question by analyzing votes in the U.S. House of Representatives on measures to weaken the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill in the years following its passage. To control as many factors as possible that could influence floor voting by individual legislators, the analysis focuses on representatives who originally cast votes in favor of the bill but then subsequently voted to dismantle key provisions of it. This design rules out from the start most factors normally advanced by skeptics to explain vote shifts, since these are the same representatives, belonging to the same political party, representing substantially the same districts. Our panel analysis, which also controls for spatial influences, highlights the importance of time-varying factors, especially political money, in moving representatives to shift their positions on amendments such as the “swaps push out” provision. Our results suggest that the links between campaign contributions from the financial sector and switches to a pro-bank vote were direct and substantial: For every $100,000 that Democratic representatives received from finance, the odds they would break with their party’s majority support for the Dodd-Frank legislation increased by 13.9 percent. Democratic representatives who voted in favor of finance often received $200,000–$300,000 from that sector, which raised the odds of switching by 25–40 percent.

scholarly journals Pharmaceuticals, Political Money, and Public Policy: A Theoretical and Empirical Agenda

2013 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 561-570 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul D. Jorgensen
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Cost Effectiveness ◽  
Pharmaceutical Industry ◽  
Interest Groups ◽  
Pharmaceutical Policy ◽  
Campaign Contributions ◽  
The Cost ◽  
Policy Problems ◽  
Selective Information ◽  
Powerful Interest

The point, for the 946,326th time is that people get elected to office by currying the favor of powerful interest groups. They don’t get elected for their excellence as political philosophers.Congress has consistently failed to solve some serious problems with the cost, effectiveness, and safety of pharmaceuticals. In part, this failure results from the pharmaceutical industry convincing legislators to define policy problems in ways that protect industry profits. By targeting campaign contributions to influential legislators and by providing them with selective information, the industry manages to displace the public’s voice in developing pharmaceutical policy.

Pareto-Improving Campaign Finance Policy

2004 ◽  
Vol 94 (3) ◽  
pp. 628-655 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Coate
Keyword(s):  
Interest Groups ◽  
Campaign Finance ◽  
Campaign Contributions ◽  
Public Financing ◽  
Finance Policy ◽  
Pareto Improving ◽  
Campaign Advertising ◽  
Contribution Limits

This paper argues that campaign finance policy, in the form of contribution limits and matching public financing, can be Pareto improving even under very optimistic assumptions concerning the role of campaign advertising and the rationality of voters. The optimistic assumptions are that candidates use campaign contributions to convey truthful information to voters about their qualifications for office and that voters update their beliefs rationally on the basis of the information they have seen.The argument also assumes that campaign contributions are provided by interest groups and that candidates can offer to provide policy favors to attract higher contributions.

scholarly journals Campaign Spending and Lobbying

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Greg Sasso ◽  
Dan Alexander
Keyword(s):  
Interest Groups ◽  
Interest Group ◽  
Comparative Statics ◽  
Campaign Spending ◽  
Campaign Contributions ◽  
Theoretic Model ◽  
Multiple Channels ◽  
Lobbying Effort ◽  
Game Theoretic ◽  
Game Theoretic Model

Interest groups can influence governmental policy through multiple channels. First, they may spend money before elections to help elect their preferred candidate. Second, they may also lobby after the election to affect the implemented policy. We analyze a game-theoretic model of campaign spending and lobbying to understand the strategic relationship between these two means of outside influence. We consider how several lobbying environments, each featuring different access to the elected politician, affect both the willingness to spend during the campaign and the final policy. Campaign spending is a function of both expected final policy due to lobbying and also expected lobbying effort costs. We find that increased policy moderation often, but not always, accompanies decreased campaign spending. When extreme interest groups give campaign contributions in exchange for access, campaign spending decreases as policy becomes more extreme. Open-access lobbying, where all interest groups lobby regardless of ideological alignment, is always best for the voter. We then show that caps on campaign contributions may have minimal effect on policy because of later lobbying efficacy. Finally, we highlight comparative statics that predict different empirical patterns of contributions depending on whether politicians grant lobbying access to all interest groups or only to ideologically-aligned groups. Our results demonstrate that interest-group and candidate polarization must be considered relative to one another; the effect of greater interest-group polarization depends to a large extent on whether it implies more or less ideological proximity to the group's aligned candidate.

scholarly journals Optimal lobbying pricing

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Konstantinos Protopappas
Keyword(s):  
Interest Groups ◽  
Symmetric Groups ◽  
Political Influence ◽  
Campaign Contributions ◽  
Election Campaign ◽  
Preferential Treatment ◽  
Benchmark Model

AbstractWe study a game with two candidates and two interest groups. The groups offer two kinds of costly contributions to achieve political influence: (a) pre-election campaign contributions to their favourite candidates that increase their probability of winning the election and (b) post-election lobbying contributions to the winning candidate to affect the implemented policy. The candidates are the first to act by strategically choosing the lobbying prices they will charge the groups if they are elected. We characterise the equilibrium values of the lobbying prices set by the candidates as well as the equilibrium levels of the campaign and lobbying contributions chosen by the groups. We show, endogenously, that in the case with symmetric groups and symmetric politicians, a candidate announces to charge the group that supports her in the election a lower lobbying price, justifying this way the preferential treatment to certain groups from the politicians in office. We also consider two extensions (asymmetric groups and politicians who do not commit to the announced prices) and show that the results of the benchmark model hold under specific conditions.

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