Legislator

Abstract: Modern studies of legislative behavior focus upon the relationship among the policy preferences of legislators, institutional arrangements, and legislative outcomes. In spatial models of legislatures, policies are represented geometrically, as points in a low-dimensional Euclidean space. Each legislator has a most preferred policy or ideal point in this space and his or her utility for a policy declines with the distance of the policy from his or her ideal point; see Davis, Hinich, and Ordeshook 1970 for an early survey. The primary use of roll call data—the recorded votes of deliberative bodies 1 —is the estimation of ideal points. The appeal and importance of ideal point estimation arises in two ways. First, ideal point estimates let us describe legislators and legislatures. The distribution of ideal points estimates reveals how cleavages between legislators reflect partisan affiliation or region or become more polarized over time (e.g., McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal 2001). Roll call data serve similar purposes for interest groups, such as Americans for Democratic Action, the National Taxpayers Union, and the Sierra Club, to produce “ratings” of legislators along different policy dimensions. Second, estimates from roll call analysis can be used to test theories of legislative behavior. For instance, roll call analysis has been used in studies of the U.S. Congress, both contemporary and

Abstract: In this paper, we argue that campaign contributions are not a form of policy-buying, but are rather a form of political participation and consumption. We summarize the data on campaign spending, and show through our descriptive statistics and our econometric analysis that individuals, not special interests, are the main source of campaign contributions. Moreover, we demonstrate that campaign giving is a normal good, dependent upon income, and campaign contributions as a percent of GDP have not risen appreciably in over 100 years: if anything, they have probably fallen. We then show that only one in four studies from the previous literature support the popular notion that contributions buy legislators' votes. Finally, we illustrate that when one controls for unobserved constituent and legislator effects, there is little relationship between money and legislator votes. Thus, the question is not why there is so little money politics, but rather why organized interests give at all. We conclude by offering potential answers to this question.

Abstract: There are two fundamentally different views of the role of elections in policy formation. In one view, voters can affect candidates’ policy choices: competition for votes induces politicians to move toward the center. In this view, elections have the effect of bringing about some degree of policy compromise. In the alternative view, voters merely elect policies: politicians cannot make credible promises to moderate their policies, and elections are merely a means to decide which one of two opposing policy views will be implemented. We assess which of these contrasting perspectives is more empirically relevant for the U. S. House. Focusing on elections decided by a narrow margin allows us to generate quasi-experimental estimates of the impact of a “randomized” change in electoral strength on subsequent representatives’ roll-call voting records. We find that voters merely elect policies: the degree of electoral strength has no effect on a legislator’s voting behavior. For example, a large exogenous increase in electoral strength for the Democratic party in a district does not result in shifting both parties’ nominees to the left. Politicians’ inability to credibly commit to a compromise appears to dominate any competition-induced convergence in policy.

Abstract: In this paper, we argue that campaign contributions are not a form of policy-buying, but are rather a form of political participation and consumption. We summarize the data on campaign spending, and show through our descriptive statistics and our econometric analysis that individuals, not special interests, are the main source of campaign contributions. Moreover, we demonstrate that campaign giving is a normal good, dependent upon income, and campaign contributions as a percent of GDP have not risen appreciably in over 100 years: if anything, they have probably fallen. We then show that only one in four studies from the previous literature support the popular notion that contributions buy legislators' votes. Finally, we illustrate that when one controls for unobserved constituent and legislator effects, there is little relationship between money and legislator votes. Thus, the question is not why there is so little money politics, but rather why organized interests give at all. We conclude by offering potential answers to this question.