Are Campaign Contributions a Form of Speech? Evidence from Recent US House Elections

This paper investigates the effects of the sources ofcandidates' campaign funding on their electoral outcomes, withparticular emphasis on whether candidates who rely on a narrowbase of funding suffer adverse electoral consequences. Anextensive dataset consisting of over 650,000 contributions toHouse candidates in elections from 1980 to 1992 is used. Theresults reveal a negative relationship between theconcentration of contributions and voteshare for open seatcandidates and challengers. This finding appears to havesignificant implications for some of the empirical premisesunderlying the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark Buckley v.Valeo decision. At the very least, it represents an importantstylized fact about US elections that is robust over 1980–1992 period.     

Budgetary Policy With Unified and Decentralized Appropriations Authority

The divestiture of the House Appropriations Committee in the1880's has received considerable attention of an empiricalnature. This paper presents a formal model of legislativedecisionmaking, using a common agency formulation to representinterest group lobbying of legislators. This framework is usedto analyze the effects of decentralizing appropriationsauthority. The conditions under which decentralization leadsto higher spending are characterized. It is argued that theconventional view that divestiture caused higher levels ofspending only holds if decentralization created barriers tolobbying and political bargaining across different committees.In addition, the role of specialized committee knowledge isexamined.     

The Condorcet Jury Theorem and the Expressive Function of Law: A Theory of Informative Law

We argue that legislation can generate compliance expressively,independently of deterrence. The Condorcet jury theorem impliesthat, in certain circumstances, the legislative process aggregatesthe private information of legislators to reach a decision superiorto that of any individual legislator. Citizens may update theirbeliefs about issues the legislation addresses even though individuallegislators are no better informed than individual citizens,and change their behavior in the direction of greater compliance.We first use a model with sincere voting and then consider strategicvoting, position-taking preferences, lobbying, and legislativeinstitutions. We use a public smoking ban for illustration,and propose an experimental test.     

Penalty Enhancement for Hate Crimes: An Economic Analysis

This article develops an economic analysis of penalty enhancementsfor bias-motivated (or "hate") crimes. Our model allows potentialoffenders' benefits from a crime to depend on the victim's groupidentity, and assumes that potential victims have the opportunityto undertake socially costly victimization avoidance activities.We derive the result that a pattern of crimes disproportionatelytargeting an identifiable group leads to greater social harm(even when the harm to an individual victim from a bias-motivatedcrime is identical to that from an equivalent non–hatecrime). In addition, we consider a number of other issues relatedto hate crime laws.