The United States Supreme Court 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission led to a major de-regulation of election campaign finance law. A new political action committee emerged from this case, known as the Super PAC, with a relatively unfettered ability to raise and spend money in elections. How were campaign spending and electoral outcomes affected? I characterize the influence of Super PACs on U.S. Congressional general and primary elections by estimating an election contest model. I exploit variation in donor finances, background information on candidates, and the dynamic model structure to deal with candidate unobservables. Results indicate that Super PACs do not have significant influence on voting outcomes but did increase election spending between 2010-2016. They affect behavior of other committees, with differences across political party and incumbency status. Finally, Super PACs have modest effects on candidate platforms and entry.

Campaign Finance in the Age of Super PACs

The best empirical research in political science clearly defines substantive parameters of interest, presents a set of assumptions that guarantee its identification, and uses an appropriate estimator. We argue for the importance of explicitly integrating rigorous theory into this process and focus on the advantages of doing so. By integrating theoretical structure into one's empirical strategy, researchers can quantify the effects of competing mechanisms, consider the ex-ante effects of new policies, extrapolate findings to new environments, estimate model-specific theoretical parameters, evaluate the fit of a theoretical model, and test competing models that aim to explain the same phenomena. As a guide to such a methodology, we provide an overview of structural estimation, including formal definitions, implementation suggestions, examples, and comparisons to other methods.

/pdf/quantifying-theory-in-politics-identification-interpretation-vu0zav3r.pdf

Quantifying Theory in Politics: Identification, Interpretation and the Role of Structural Methods

In a representative democracy, politicians should either implement policies that voters want or policies that politicians believe are in voters long-term interest, even if voters currently oppose them. The exact balance between these goals is debatable and politicians' policy engagement can tempt them to dismiss voters' preferences and resist information counter to their own policy position. In this paper, we discuss Sweden's generous migration policy and how it can serve as an example where politicians' policy engagement led them to a overly optimistic view of the implications of welcoming a large influx of refugees. Using detailed, repeated, survey data on members of parliament, we show that Swedish politicians favored a much more generous policy toward accepting refugees than voters for a long period of time. Neither observable factors nor expert knowledge can explain this difference between voters and politicians. A more likely explanations is wishful thinking and policy engagement from politicians that continued until political competition increased.

Misrepresentation and migration

Individual members of Congress can have different policy preferences from the party leadership or special interest groups (SIGs), and the latter two may pressure members to shift their positions. To study this tension, we develop and estimate a multi-stage election model that incorporates party discipline with election spending. First, we uncover the unobserved “ideal” policies of these different political agents. Second, we estimate disciplining constraints and the importance of “policy gaps” with candidates to parties and SIGs. We then study various dimensions of discipline: the conditions under which representatives become more responsive to SIGs, the effects of safe seats on disciplining ability, and the limits of disciplining in the U.S. We ﬁnd that safe seats make discipline less effective and that voter preferences are the main predictors of incumbent positions.

Party Discipline in Elections and Latent Policy Ideals

Normative theories of representative democracy imply that politicians should be better informed of the consequences of a policy than ordinary voters. However, in real life, politicians can have strong convictions that risk blinding them to arguments against their positions. Policy engagement can lead politicians into motivated reasoning whereby they dismiss voters’ preferences and resist information counter to their own policy position. In this paper, we argue that Sweden’s generous migration policy is an example of a case where politicians’ policy engagement led them to motivated reasoning and to a rather optimistic view of the implications of welcoming a large influx of refugees. We show that Swedish politicians favoured a much more generous policy towards accepting refugees than their own voters. Despite limited evidence that a generous refugee policy is economically favourable in the long run, politicians on average held that belief

Misrepresentation and Migration: Differences between Voters and Politicians in Sweden

Democratic representation is constrained by the alternatives available to voters. To assess the extent to which the “supply side” of politics hinders voter welfare, we use rich data on thousands of candidates in three Brazilian legislative elections to (i) quantify the relative value voters place on candidates’ policy positions and non-ideological attributes and (ii) evaluate voters’ welfare given the set of candidates they face. Our estimates uncover substantial welfare losses for voters relative to three alternative benchmarks of ideal representation. The average voter suffers only a moderate loss due to policy incongruence but a large loss due to deficiencies in candidates’ non-ideological characteristics. For the typical municipality, the welfare loss attributable to non-ideological factors is more than seven times larger than the policy welfare loss. To evaluate the consequences of potential institutional reforms, we develop and estimate a model of equilibrium policy determination. Through counterfactual experiments, we show that institutional reforms aimed at improving the quality of representation may have sizable unintended welfare consequences due to equilibrium policy adjustments.

Representation Failure

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Representation Failure