Michael C. Munger

Legislators and Interest Groups: How Unorganized Interests Get Represented

This paper derives a supply price for public policy using a constrained maximization model. In the model, three sets of agents each have preferences over outcomes: organized interest groups offer campaign contributions to improve their own wealth, voters offer votes to obtain outcomes closer to their most preferred outcomes, and legislators seek both campaign contributions and votes to obtain reelection. A given legislators supply price for policy is shown to depend on the productivity of his effort, as determined by committee assignments, priority and ability, and by the preferences of his unorganized constituency in the home district. Two extreme assumptions about the effectiveness of campaign spending in eliciting votes are used to illustrate the comparative statics properties of the model. The prediction of the model is that interest groups will, in general, seek out legislators whose voters are indifferent to the policy the interest group seeks. Thus, voters who do have preferences over policy are in effect represented, even though they are not organized.

Closeness, Expenditures, and Turnout in the 1982 U.S. House Elections

Students of elections have repeatedly found that the closeness of an election is modestly correlated with turnout. This may be due to a direct response of instrumentally motivated voters, but recent theoretical work casts doubt on the adequacy of this explanation. Another possibility is that elite actors respond to closeness with greater effort at mobilization. We explore the latter possibility by using FEC and state data on campaign expenditures in House, Senate, and gubernatorial races. Our results indicate that closeness has an effect at both the mass and elite levels. We also provide quantitative estimates of the effect of Senate and gubernatorial expenditure on House turnout.

The Determinants of Industry Political Activity, 1978–1986.

While the allocation of interest group monies to specific politicians has been extensively studied, little is known about the factors that determine of the overall level of political activity across groups. We study total contributions by corporate political action committees at the industry level. We create a large data set on industry political activity, covering 124 industries across five election cycles from 1978 to 1986 and sketch out a simple benefit-cost model to predict total corporate PAC contributions in each industry. The few previous studies of this phenomenon use relatively small samples and employ statistical techniques that are either biased or impose untested restrictions. The selectivity-corrected regression technique used here solves these problems. We find that industries with greater potential benefits from government assistance contribute systematically more but that the ability to realize these benefits is constrained by collective action problems facing firms in each industry.

Economic Models of Interest Groups: An Introductory Survey

Classical pluralists, the authors of The Federalist Papers, and many modem scholars have emphasized the critical role of the interests in shaping policies. Still, in general, deductive theory has not provided the hypotheses and explanations offered by political science in studying interests. Economists studying interest groups have taken a more abstract, analytical approach, but this work is largely unknown in political science, perhaps because it is enshrouded in jargon and arcane terminology. We review this literature, using as our motivation two fundamental questions: First, how do interest groups influence policy in a democracy? Second, how should the institutions of government be designed to encourage or control this influence? The models we review are generally of a formal, mathematical nature, but we focus solely on their intuitive content and their contribution to our knowledge of democracy and representation.

The Rationality of Ideology

SEVERAL recent empirical studies of legislative voting conclude that forces other than the objectively identifiable self-interest of voters in a district influence a representatives voting behavior.1 Each of these studies finds that the explanatory power of a regression of congressional votes on constituent characteristics is improved by including a separate measure of the ideology of the representative in question. The authors of these studies differ, however, with regard to what their respective measures of ideology represent. Kau and Rubin view politicians as accurate representatives of the ideological views of their constituents.2 Kalt and Zupan acknowledge the possibility that ideological voting by representatives reflects the ideology of their constituents. They also accept Downss3 point that ideology may be an efficient way for politicians to summarize their positions on the issues. They claim, how-

The impact of legislator attributes on interest-group campaign contributions

Legislators possess political assets that economic interest groups may find valuable in pursuing their goals. This paper examines the effect these legislative assets have on the campaign contributions made by two large and easily identifiable interest groups: corporations and labor unions. Committee assignment, voting record, and electoral security are significant predictors of both corporate and union contributions to House incumbents, while party affiliation and years in office also influence the behavior of union political action committees.

The Industrial Organization of Corporate Political Participation

The study of industrial organization and regulation has been transformed over the past twenty years by the recognition that firms have incentives, and may possess the ability, to influence policies designed to regulate their activities. The basic paradigm of industrial organization, and the basis for regulatory and antitrust policy in the U.S., asserts market structure determines conduct, and that conduct determines performance. If public policy were exogenously formulated and implemented, optimal performance (productive and allocative efficiency, full employment, etc.) could be obtained by appropriate antitrust policy to affect industry structure and appropriate regulation to deter anticompetitive conduct. But policy is not exogenous. Neither the formulation nor implementation of antitrust or regulation is insulated from attempts by those affected to influence policy to their benefit. Further, there are important reasons to expect industry structure to determine the conduct of the firm not just in the market but also in the political process. Structure determines conduct and performance, but not only through the traditionally emphasized routes of pricing and output decisions. Structure may also affect performance by advantaging certain firms, or certain industries, in political competition. The resulting regulatory regime may well create and protect systematic differences in economic performance by restricting, rather than facilitating, normal market processes. Surprisingly little is known about the implications of industry structure for success in politi-

The impact of legislator attributes on union PAC campaign contributions

Unions are shown to have a sophisticated understanding of the political process, and to allocate their political resources based on this understanding. Two different tests of this hypothesis are presented. First, using a chi-square test, we show union contributions go disproportionately to members of committees with legislative and regulatory jurisdiction over their activities. Second, using logistic regression analysis, we demonstrate that this result is robust with respect to the inclusion of other institutional variables such as seniority, voting record, party, and electoral competitiveness.

Shirking, Representation, and Congressional Behavior: Voting on the 1983 Amendments to the Social Security Act

SummaryOur central goals at the outset of the paper were three: (1) to report on the relative significance of a sophisticated measure of constituent economic interest and a commonly used variable, ADA score, that purports to measure the personal ideology of the candidate; (2) demonstrate that the constituent economic interest variable should be adjusted to account for the fact thatvoters, not citizens, are the only effective principals in influencing a legislators voting activities; and (3) call into question, on both theoretical and empirical grounds, the claim that legislators shirk their responsibilities to voters by voting their own ideological preferences. In order to evaluate our efforts, consider Table 5. For a large majority (15) of the 18 relevant runs, the ideological variable is significant. Our measure of constituent economic interests does not eliminate the explanatory power of the ideological voting variable, but this does not indicate shirking. As opposed to shirking, we may observe ideological voting because (1) it provides brand name capital, (2) it represents the ideological preferences of the constituents, or (3) it acts as a measure of median voter economic preferences. Further, ADA scores do not allow us to differentiate between these competing explanations.Table 5. Comparison of House and Senate resultsEconomic variableIdeological variableHouseSenateTotalSignificantNot significantSignificantNot significantKalt-Zupan Insignificant——4—4Kalt-Zupan Significant332—8Peltzman Insignificant——3—3Peltzman Significan——3—3Total3312018 For 11 of the 18 models one of the economic variables accounts for a significant portion of the variance in the dependent variables. The results derived from our measure of constituent economic interests contradict most findings of the LASI school and raise questions about the validity of the empirical characterization of constituent interests in that research.A breakdown of the results by chamber indicates that significant differences in the degree of ideological voting between the House and Senate may exist. This is important in that most research has focused only on the Senate where ideological voting is more prevalent. For the House, Table 5 reveals the constituent economic interest variable isalways significant, and in fully one-half of the relevant regressions it is theonly significant variable, knocking ADA out of the race. As noted earlier, the insignificance of ADA is some indication of the absence of ideological shirking though its significance may indicate only measurement error, voter ideology, or reputational capital. In the Senate, the results are more evenly split, though it is clear that the adjusted (for reelection constituency) economic interest variable is an improvement. ADA is significant in all 12 Senate regressions, and the respective economic variables are significant in 5, or just under half.This side-by-side comparison is provocative, though it remains to be tested in detail. But our preliminary conclusions can be stated as follows. First, as Peltzman (1984) suggested, a better specification of economic interest and constituency representation reduces, though it does not eliminate, the role of the ADA variable in the Senate. Second, we find evidence that ideological shirking, if it exists, is much smaller in the House. In fact, from an institutional perspective, it can be argued that economic interests are dominant, since House districts are smaller and more homogeneous. Further, the shorter terms for House members may make them more directly accountable to voters, and smaller groups of voters may force a lesser reliance on pure ideological campaigning and require a more personal presentation of self.

A simple test of the thesis that committee jurisdictions shape corporate PAC contributions

ConclusionThe results presented in the previous section tend to confirm the hypothesis that committee assignments shape the pattern of corporate PAC contributions. This note corroborates existing research on corporate PACs at a significantly lower level of aggregation than the samples on which existing research has been conducted. Further, because a nonparametric test was used (rather than the more standard regressional analysis), these results should increase our confidence that the essential institutions of government affect, and engender responses by, economic agents.