The effectiveness of savings and loan political action committees

In recent years, political action committees (PACs) have played an increasingly important role, both in contributing to candidates and in influencing voting patterns. Savings and loan PACs are numerous throughout the country and consist of PACs affiliated with individual institutions and trade associations. The question which is addressed in this research paper is the effectiveness which savings and loan related PACs have had on influencing voting patterns. Because of savings and loan allegiance to the real estate industry, voting patterns on a selected set of nine cogressional bills pertaining to various facets of real estate are used to test PAC effectiveness. These bills were voted on by the House of Representatives during the 1978–80 congressional term. A twenty-one simultaneous equation model which employs probit transformations, maximum likelihood estimation procedures, and two stage least squares, is built to test relationships among the endogenous variables of congressional votes, electoral margin, PAC contributions, and constituent and congressional ideology. In addition to testing the effectiveness of savings and loan PAC contributions, the results of the study shed light on savings and loan PAC performance relative to that of real estate PACs, labor PACs, home builder PACs, business PACs, and other PAC groupings. The model is also used to identify some determinants of PAC contribution patterns. As a related issue, the role of ideology as a predictor of voting patterns is re-examined. Findings indicate that savings and loan PACs have only been marginally successful in influencing real estate voting patterns when compared to the other PAC groups. Results also indicate that few variables could be identified as determinants of savings and loan contributions, whereas other more established PACs had determinants which were consistently significant. Overall, findings imply that PAC contribution procedures of the savings and loan industry could benefit by imitating or purchasing the expertise of more experienced PAC groups.     

Ideology and Interests in the Political Marketplace

I develop a statistical method to measure the ideology of candidates and political action committees (PACs) using contribution data. The method recovers ideal points for incumbents that strongly correlate with ideological measures recovered from voting records, while simultaneously recovering positions for PACs, unsuccessful challengers, and open‐seat candidates. As the candidate ideal points are estimated independently of voting records, they represent a useful new resource for testing models of legislative behavior. By incorporating nonideological covariates known to influence PAC contributions, the method also shows promise as a platform for furthering our understanding of PAC contribution behavior.     

Organizational variables and contribution behavior of large PACs: A longitudinal analysis

Although there has been a good deal of research on PAC contribution behavior, to date there has been no effort to systematically evaluate the impact of various organizational characteristics of PACs on their contribution behavior over time. Using data from a newly released longitudinal file from the Federal Election Commission, I examine the impact of organizational variables on the contribution behavior of large PACs in three election cycles, and on changes in contribution behavior between these elections. I find that PAC type, size, age, and the presence of a Washington office are all important determinants of PAC contributions. Changes in organizational characteristics, particularly growth in revenues, are weakly related to change in contribution behavior, which seems to be primarily a response to changes in the strategic environment.     

An organizational analysis of political action committees

As the number and putative importance of political action committees have grown, so too has scholarly attention to this new breed of political organization. Yet this attention has been uneven. Although much is now known about the aggregate spending patterns of PACs, much less is known about their internal lives. The present study attempts to open the PAC black box to empirical inquiry. Drawing on interviews with the managers of 70 Washington-based political action committees, we suggest how theoretical perspectives about formal voluntary associations may be usefully applied in explaining the behavior of PACs. After examining the relationships among several variables — organizational goals, constituency relations and decision making, strategy, and interorganizational relations — we show how these forces affect the behavior of corporate, trade/membership, labor, and nonconnected PACS.     

Political action committees at the state level: Contributions to education

This paper examines campaign contributions from educational political action committees (PACs). Using a new and unique data set of political activity of the educational PACs across the fifty states and throughout the decade of the nineties, the authors describe the contributions' patterns of these groups. The authors argue that teachers occupy a low cost position for organizing. Approximately 90 percent of educational PAC spending is on behalf of teachers' organizations. Generalized least squares analysis of the state-year variance in contributions indicate that competition between teachers' groups and other education interest groups is a significant factor that influences the educational PACs expenditures.     

Presidential campaign expenditures: Evidence on allocations and effects

This paper analyzes the impact of presidential campaign spending on election results. Analyses of expenditures and voting are often plagued by simultaneity between campaign spending and expected vote share. However, game-theoretic models of resource-allocation decisions made by a central actor (i.e., a presidential campaign) suggest that candidates will spend more in close races and in races likely to be pivotal. We provide empirical support for this theory; using Federal Communications Commission data from the 1972 presidential election, we find that expenditures were higher in states where the election was expected to be closer and in states likely to be pivotal. We use these two factors as instruments in a two-stage least squares model to estimate the effect of spending on votes. We find that, contrary to previous theory and research, presidential campaign spending significantly increases a candidate's vote share.     

Mobilizing Interest: The Effects of Money on Citizen Participation in State Supreme Court Elections

In this article, we investigate one highly significant aspect of the role of money in judicial elections: whether campaign spending increases citizen participation in the recruitment and retention of judges. Specifically, by using a two-stage modeling strategy that allows us to separate the effects of challengers from the effects of money, we assess whether relatively expensive campaigns improve the chances that citizens will vote in the 260 supreme court elections held from 1990 through 2004 in 18 states using partisan or nonpartisan elections to staff the high court bench. We find that increased spending significantly improves citizen participation in these races. Whether measured as the overall spending in each election or in per capita terms, greater spending facilitates voting. We conclude, contrary to conventional wisdom about the deleterious effects of money in judicial elections, that by stimulating mass participation and giving voters greater ownership in the outcomes of these races, expensive campaigns strengthen the critical linkage between citizens and the bench and enhance the quality of democracy.     

Voter turnout: How much can we explain?

This paper evaluates the ability of common explanatory variables to predict who votes. Logit voting regressions are estimated with more than three dozen explanatory variables using survey and aggregate data for the 1979, 1980, 1984, and 1988 Canadian national elections. We find that the usual demographic variables such as age and education, and contextual variables such as campaign spending have significant effects on the probability of voting, but the models have low R2's and cannot predict who votes more accurately than random guessing. We also estimate regressions using past voting behavior as a predictor of current behavior, and find that although the explanatory power rises it remains low. This suggests that the difficulty in explaining turnout arises primarily from omitted time- varying variables. In some sense, then, it appears that whether or not a person votes is to a large degree random. The evidence provides support for the rational voter theory, and is problematic for psycho/sociological approaches.     

Modeling spending preferences & public policy

Understanding preferences over government spending is important for understanding electoral behavior and many other aspects of the political world. Using data on relative preferences for more or less spending across different issue areas, we estimate the general spending preferences of individuals and congressional candidates along a left-right spending dimension. Our modeling approach also allows us to estimate the location of policies on this same dimension, permitting direct comparison of people's spending preferences with where they perceive policy to be. We find that public shows very low levels of polarization on spending preferences, even across characteristics like partisanship, ideology, or income level. The distribution of candidates' spending preferences shows much more sorting by party, but candidates are significantly less polarized than is contemporary voting in Congress.     

Finance industry PAC contributions to U.S. Senators, 1983–88

In this paper, I examine the relationship between campaign contributions from PACs representing the finance industry and membership on sixteen standing committees in the Senate. I hypothesize that finance industry PACs will contribute more to the Banking committee, the Senate committee with the greatest responsibility for developing public policy that affects the finance industry. My results indicate that committee assignment does influence the distribution of finance industry PAC money; the finance industry does give significantly more to members of the Senate Banking committee. This is the first study to find this relationship between PAC contributions and committee membership in the Senate.     

Looking for leverage in PAC markets: Corporate and labor contributions considered

In this paper we explore the popular perception that political action committees (PACs) have substantial influence over elected legislators. We question whether the leverage in the PAC market is on the side of the contribution-maker or the contribution-taker. Analysis of the structure of PAC markets suggests most markets are sellers' markets, not buyers' markets. PAC contributions then may be more like protection money than attempts to buy votes or access. The leverage of the politician (seller) may be tempered if a substantial number of large PACs have homogeneous interests, and the ability to concentrate their contributions to the same legislators. This contention is supported by analysis of differences in labor and corporate PAC giving in the 1980 and 1984 general elections. Labor PACs, which are much larger than corporate PACs, have more homogeneous interests, give virtually all of their money to one party, and appear to have more discretion in making contribution decisions than do corporate PACs. An implication of this analysis for corporate executives is that using political action committees at the federal level may not be a strategy where corporations have a comparative advantage. — Senator Robert Dole (R-Kan.) — Senator Thomas Eaglecton (D-Mo.)     

False advertising and experience goods: the case of political services in the U.S. senate

This study uses the voter-shopping construct to analyze signaling of moderateness in the U.S. Senate. We compare legislator-provided signals (advertising)—such as membership in the U.S. Senate’s Centrist Coalition—with actual voting histories in order to characterize these types of advertising cues as sincere or insincere. Following recent research indicating that moderate legislators receive greater financial support, we test whether or not Political Action Committees (PACs) are willing to support financially those who send false signals of moderateness. Our results show that the mean level of real PAC contributions garnered by non-moderate Democrats who send false signals exceeds that of the non-moderate Democrats who do not do so by $182,078. This figure is about 74% of mean level of real PAC contributions for those non-moderate Democrats who do not send false signals.     

Ideology,economic interests,and congressional roll-call voting: Partisan instability and Bank of the United States legislation, 1811–1816

We introduce a wrinkle into the study of Congressional roll-call voting by focusing on a period of partisan instability in American History: the Era of Good Feelings. During deviations from normal periods of two-party rule, the dominant model of voting behavior, the ideological model, loses precision in correctly classifying individual votes. We contend that a “pooled” voting model – comprised of both ideological and economic variables – performs better than the basic ideological model during these unstable periods. When party mechanisms no longer constrain or structure actions, we believe the “electoral connection” is especially important, and, thus, economic-based constituency factors must be included in models of vote choice. To explore this belief, we focus on a particularly contentious issue – the rechartering of the Bank of the United States (BUS) – which was dealt with before and after a partisan decomposition occurred in the House. Using measures developed by Poole and Rosenthal (1985, 1997), we find that the vote on the First BUS in 1811, during a stable partisan period, is organized along ideological lines. By 1816, the two-party system collapsed, and we do not find the vote on the Second BUS to exhibit much ideological structure. Conversely, we find that our pooled model predicts the vote on the Second BUS quite well, providing a substantial improvement in fit over the basic ideological classification.     

The Calculus of Voting in Compulsory Voting Systems

Compulsory voting laws have consistently been demonstrated to boost electoral participation. Despite the widespread presence of compulsory voting and the significant impact these laws appear to have on voting behavior, surprisingly little effort has been devoted to analyzing how mandatory voting alters the decision-making calculus of individual voters in these systems. Moreover, studies that investigate the influence of compulsory voting laws on electoral participation generally treat these policies monolithically, with scant attention to the nuances that differentiate mandatory voting laws across systems and to their consequences for voting rates. Analyses that explicitly and empirically examine the effects of penalties and enforcement are surprisingly rare. This study aims to fill that void by adapting rational choice models of participation in elections for compulsory voting systems. I find that the level of penalties countries impose for non-compliance and the degree of penalty enforcement impact turnout rates. Voters in mandatory voting systems abstain least when both the penalties and the likelihood of enforcement are high, and abstain most when both meaningless.

Improving access to voting with optimized matchings

Research on political representation has traditionally focused on the design of electoral systems. Yet there is evidence that voting costs result in lower turnout and undermine voters’ confidence in the electoral system. Election administrators can selectively manipulate participation costs for different individuals and groups, leading to biased electoral outcomes. Quantifying the costs of voting and designing fair, transparent and efficient rules for voter assignment to polling stations are important for theoretical and practical reasons. Using analytical models, we quantify the differential costs of participation faced by voters, which we measure in terms of distance to polling stations and wait times to cast a vote. To estimate the model parameters, we use real-world data on the 2013 midterm elections in Argentina. The assignment produced by our model cut average voting time by more than 27%, underscoring the inefficiencies of the current method of alphabetical assignment. Our strategy generates better estimates of the role of geographical and temporal conditions on electoral outcomes.     

The electoral college and the rational vote

We have shown first, that if the electoral college was abolished the theoretically measured power of voters would increase and second, that in presidential elections the measure of voting power used does in fact have a highly significant impact on the decision as to whether or not to vote. Thus, the analysis predicts that the abolition of the electoral college would have a significant impact on voter participation. From a policy viewpoint, if we view participation in elections as desirable, this could be used as an argument in favor of direct election of the president. From a scientific viewpoint, we are able to make a strong and unambiguous prediction about the results of a (possible) future event from theoretical considerations. If the electoral college should be abolished, it will be possible to test our predictions. In addition, we have provided a further test of the rational behavior view of electoral participation and have shown that this model applies to presidential elections. Finally, we have shown that the theoretical measure of voting power does predict actual behavior.     

States and PACs: The legacy of established decision rules

The growth of political action committees (PACs) and their growing role in campaign finance have led to calls for placing limits on campaign contributions by PACs. State decisions regarding whether to limit PAC contributions appear to result from established policy orientations regarding other campaign finance issues: states with a history of previous efforts to regulate campaign finances are more likely to limit PAC contributions.     

The rational behavior theory of voting participation: Evidence from the 1970 and 1982 elections

In recent years a substantial literature on the determinants of voting participation has been developed. In many of these studies voting is assumed to be an expression of rational behavior. That is, people vote when they expect that the benefits will exceed the related costs. Voting is largely an act of consumption based upon the widely held belief that one should vote to fulfill a civic duty or upon some combination of personal characteristics which is sufficiently vague to make precise measurement impossible. The rational behavior theory, however, holds that voting is influenced at the margin by personal and environmental factors which incrementally affect expected benefits and costs, making the act of voting more or less rational. Those factors which increase expected benefits will, ceteris paribus, enhance the probability that one will vote. Those factors which increase expected costs will, of course, have the opposite effect. This study is presented as a primarily empirical contribution to the literature which assumes that, since voting is an expression of rational behavior, it can be modeled and tested using standard economic analysis and methodology. The study is designed to fulfill several purposes. First, we update previous empirical work using data from the 1980 census and from the 1982 congressional elections. The results of our regressions strongly support the rational behavior theory. In addition, we test to determine whether it is less rational for southern blacks to vote as compared to their white counterparts. Our results suggest that the answer is affirmative. Tests of parameter equivalency between the 1970 and 1982 congressional elections are performed with some interesting results. Finally, tests for specification error provide evidence that the rational behavior model and congressional district data generate statistically valid estimates of the determinants of voting participation.     

Cost and the calculus of voting

Downs's (1957) theory of voting maintains that individuals balance the costs of voting against anticipated benefits in deciding whether to vote. However, most empirical tests of his theory have concluded that costs play little role in individuals' decisions to vote or abstain, and that benefits are the determining factor. Unfortunately, the existing empirical tests of the theory have been inadequate, especially in regard to the measurement of the cost of voting. Using data from the Comparative State Elections Project, we develop an improved indicator of the cost of voting. When this measure of cost is used in a test of Down's theory, we find, contrary to most earlier research, that the cost of voting seems to be a more important determinant of participation than the factors associated with voting benefits in Downs's model.The authors shared equally in the research reported; the order in which they are listed was determined randomly.     

Three-candidate spatial competition when candidates have valence: stochastic voting

We study the effects of stochastic (probabilistic) voting on equilibrium locations, equilibrium vote shares and comparative statics in a setup with three heterogeneous candidates and a single-dimensional issue space. Comparing the equilibria with and without stochastic voting, we find that under an appropriate level of uncertainty about voter behavior, the model has a pure strategy Nash Equilibrium (PSNE) that is free from several non-plausible features of the PSNE under deterministic voting. This result is robust to extensions to asymmetric density and plurality maximization.