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Influence without Bribes: A Noncontracting Model of Campaign Giving and Policymaking

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2017

Justin Fox  and
Lawrence Rothenberg
Justin Fox
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520. e-mail: justin.fox@yale.edu
Lawrence Rothenberg*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627
*
e-mail: lrot@mail.rochester.edu (corresponding author)
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Abstract

Efforts to find empirical evidence that campaign money impacts policymaking choices have offered scant support for interest group influence. A possible explanation is that the hypothesis that those receiving campaign monies should adjust their policy choices to favor their donor requires the untenable assumption that interest groups and legislators can implement contracts. We develop a new, alternative, model in which legislators and interest groups cannot engage in any form of contracting, and legislators care about both the policy and fundraising implications of their policy choices. In our model, an interest group gives only to those it believes shares its policy preferences. Nonetheless, we show that the group's giving impacts incumbent policy choices. Importantly, when groups ideologically match, the relationship between actual contributions and bias is not straightforward. As long as a group is uncertain about a member's primitive policy preference, it can influence her policymaking even when it contributes to her challenger or abstains from giving altogether.

Type
Research Article
Information
Political Analysis , Volume 19 , Issue 3 , Summer 2011 , pp. 325 - 341
Copyright
Copyright © The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Political Methodology 

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Footnotes

Authors' note: We thank Dan Butler, Steven Callander, Randy Calvert, Chris Chambers, Stacey Chen, Seok-Ju Cho, John Duggan, Andy Eggers, Sonying Fang, Mark Fey, Greg Huber, Jaehoon Kim, Carlos Maravall, Jianjun Miao, Juan Moreno-Ternero, Maggie Penn, David Primo, Alan Wiseman, and seminar participants at the Kellogg Graduate School of Management, New York University, the Stanford Graduate School of Business, the State University of New York at Stony Brook, the University of Michigan, the University of Minnesota, the University of Rochester, the University of Wisconsin, and Yale University for helpful comments and discussion on earlier versions of this paper. Supplementary materials for this article are available on the Political Analysis Web site.

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