Going through the motions
Randall Holcombe & Christopher Boudreaux
Public Choice, July 2015, Pages 75-85
Abstract:
Higher levels of government expenditures and more regulation naturally invite corruption, because they provide the opportunity for government officials to be paid off for regulatory favors, subsidies, and government contracts. Some countries have relatively large governments but lower levels of corruption. Scandinavian countries offer examples. While institutional differences may explain some of the cross-country differences in corruption, the most consistent relationship is that high levels of regulation are associated with more corruption. When looking at the effect of the size of government, it is the regulatory state, rather than the productive or redistributive state, that is associated with corruption.
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Simon Haeder & Susan Webb Yackee
American Political Science Review, August 2015, Pages 507-522
Abstract:
All administrative processes contain points of entry for politics, and the U.S. president's use of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to review government regulations is no exception. Specifically, OMB review can open up a pathway for interest groups to lobby for policy change. We theorize that interest group lobbying can be influential during OMB review, especially when there is consensus across groups. We use a selection model to test our argument with more than 1,500 regulations written by federal agencies that were subjected to OMB review. We find that lobbying is associated with change during OMB review. We also demonstrate that, when only business groups lobby, we are more likely to see rule change; however, the same is not true for public interest groups. We supplement these results with illustrative examples suggesting that interest groups can, at times, use OMB review to influence the content of legally binding government regulations.
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Renee Bowen & Cecilia Hyunjung Mo
Journal of Theoretical Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
When do voters win? In this paper we derive conditions under which a democracy will produce policies that favor the voter over special interests. We show that increasing political competition, increasing office holding benefits, decreasing potential rents to firms and increasing the salience of policy implies improved policies for the representative voter. We also find a positive interaction between the effect of political competition and office holding benefits. Panel data from the United States supports the model’s predictions. The ratio of taxes paid by individuals relative to corporations is decreasing with governor salary (a proxy for office holding benefits), protest activity (a proxy for policy salience), and political competition. Additionally, minimum wages are increasing with governor salary, protest activity, and political competition.
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Policy Influence and Private Returns from Lobbying in the Energy Sector
Karam Kang
Review of Economic Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
In this paper, I quantify the extent to which lobbying expenditures by firms affect policy enactment. To achieve this end, I construct a novel dataset containing all federal energy legislation and lobbying activities by the energy sector during the 110th Congress. I then develop and estimate a game-theoretic model where heterogeneous players choose lobbying expenditures to affect the probability that a policy is enacted. I find that the effect of lobbying expenditures on a policy’s equilibrium enactment probability to be statistically significant but very small. Nonetheless, the average returns from lobbying expenditures are estimated to be over 130 percent.
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Editorial Bias in Crowd-Sourced Political Information
Joshua Kalla & Peter Aronow
PLoS ONE, September 2015
Abstract:
The Internet has dramatically expanded citizens’ access to and ability to engage with political information. On many websites, any user can contribute and edit “crowd-sourced” information about important political figures. One of the most prominent examples of crowd-sourced information on the Internet is Wikipedia, a free and open encyclopedia created and edited entirely by users, and one of the world’s most accessed websites. While previous studies of crowd-sourced information platforms have found them to be accurate, few have considered biases in what kinds of information are included. We report the results of four randomized field experiments that sought to explore what biases exist in the political articles of this collaborative website. By randomly assigning factually true but either positive or negative and cited or uncited information to the Wikipedia pages of U.S. senators, we uncover substantial evidence of an editorial bias toward positivity on Wikipedia: Negative facts are 36% more likely to be removed by Wikipedia editors than positive facts within 12 hours and 29% more likely within 3 days. Although citations substantially increase an edit’s survival time, the editorial bias toward positivity is not eliminated by inclusion of a citation. We replicate this study on the Wikipedia pages of deceased as well as recently retired but living senators and find no evidence of an editorial bias in either. Our results demonstrate that crowd-sourced information is subject to an editorial bias that favors the politically active.
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Return to Spender: The Electoral Connection’s Effect on Veto Challenges and Overrides
Dave Bridge
The Forum, July 2015, Pages 289–309
Abstract:
This paper uses assumptions about position taking and credit claiming to help predict when Congress will challenge and override a presidential veto. Using assumptions about position taking and credit claiming to generate measurable hypotheses, I find that vetoes on spending bills are 13.0 percentage points more likely to be challenged and 13.1 percentage points more likely to be overridden. Furthermore, spending vetoes are more likely to be overridden when congressional elections are nearing. The results confirm that the electoral connection not only explains individual behavior, but can also help predict institutional outcomes.
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The Corporate Value of (Corrupt) Lobbying
Alexander Borisov, Eitan Goldman & Nandini Gupta
Review of Financial Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
We examine whether the stock market considers corporate lobbying to be value enhancing, using an event that limited the ability of firms to lobby but was exogenous to their characteristics and prior lobbying decisions. The results show that this exogenous shock affects negatively the value of firms that lobby. In particular, we estimate that a firm that spends 100,000 more on lobbying in the 3 years before the shock (where sample average lobbying expenses are about 4 million), experiences a loss of about $1.2 million in shareholder value on average. We also examine the channels through which lobbying may create value for firms.
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Bradley Dickerson
American Politics Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Citizens process economic information in ways that confirm their prior political beliefs. We therefore see stronger effects of presidential approval on economic perceptions than vice versa. Yet as economic conditions worsen, voters become heavily exposed to negative economic information and more likely to experience conflicting political and economic considerations. As conditions improve, identities and evaluations fall back into sync and political attitudes become more useful as an identity-confirming shortcut. I expect that the effect of economic perceptions on presidential approval grows stronger as economic conditions worsen and the effect of presidential approval on economic perceptions grows stronger as conditions improve. Using panel data from four American National Election Studies, I apply simultaneous equation extensions of the Anderson–Hsiao estimator to test the relationship between economic and political attitudes. Results show that the effect of economic perceptions on presidential approval was substantially stronger during the Great Recession than during the previous three panel studies.
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Professionalism and Contracts in Organizations
Canice Prendergast
Journal of Labor Economics, July 2015, Pages 591-621
Abstract:
Employees in public agencies rarely have pay for performance: instead their incentives are often guided by a sense of professionalism. This paper concerns how organizations should monitor professionals. The primary outcome of the paper is that weak incentives lead public agencies to exhibit bias in their oversight, by rewarding the interests of their employees to the detriment of other constituencies’ concerns. In some instances, this bias is complete by entirely ignoring other interests.
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Lexical shifts, substantive changes, and continuity in State of the Union discourse, 1790–2014
Alix Rule, Jean-Philippe Cointet & Peter Bearman
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 1 September 2015, Pages 10837–10844
Abstract:
This study reveals that the entry into World War I in 1917 indexed the decisive transition to the modern period in American political consciousness, ushering in new objects of political discourse, a more rapid pace of change of those objects, and a fundamental reframing of the main tasks of governance. We develop a strategy for identifying meaningful categories in textual corpora that span long historic durées, where terms, concepts, and language use changes. Our approach is able to account for the fluidity of discursive categories over time, and to analyze their continuity by identifying the discursive stream as the object of interest.
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The Impact of Direct Democracy on State Spending Priorities
Daniel Lewis, Saundra Schneider & William Jacoby
Electoral Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
Do direct democracy institutions affect governmental policy? Previous research on the American states has generated a disparate variety of findings, so there is no scholarly consensus on this question. We argue that many earlier works were limited by their focus on single policy areas or static analyses. To overcome these issues, we analyze yearly data on governmental spending priorities across a full array of policy areas in the 50 states from 1982 through 2011. Our results clearly show that direct democracy states devote more resources to collective goods policies while non-direct democracy states emphasize particularized benefits. This difference occurs because public preferences in direct democracy states are more closely aligned with policy priorities than is the case in states without direct democracy institutions.
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Making Constitutional Meaning: The Removal Debate and the Birth of Constitutional Essentialism
Jonathan Gienapp
Journal of the Early Republic, Fall 2015, Pages 375-418
Abstract:
In one of its earliest debates, the first federal Congress divided over the question of whether the president could remove executive officers. Long neglected by historians, the episode has received ample attention from constitutional scholars who have interpreted it as a crucial contest over the scope of presidential power. However, the debate’s significance owes less to these implications than it does to the language of constitutional essentialism that it produced. In the aftermath of ratification, American politicians were still reckoning with what it meant to be subject to the authority of a supreme, written constitution and in so doing debated not only the meaning of specific constitutional clauses but more generally the kinds of interpretive practices that could legitimately accompany Americans’ governing document. The removal debate began because the Constitution, other than specifications for impeachment, was silent on removal. Some contended that, given this silence, nobody could remove. Most disagreed and as justification contended that Congress enjoyed discretion to fill the document’s silences. However, those who favored removal divided over who could remove: the president alone or in conjunction with the Senate. In waging this disagreement the two sides grounded their rival interpretations in two separate sources of authority: the ‘‘nature of things’’ and the original intent of the Constitution’s framers. In retreating from arguments built on congressional discretion in favor of ones premised on fixed constitutional meaning, politicians constructed a powerful language of constitutional essentialism that implied that the Constitution was equipped with unchangeable meaning.
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The Loyalists and the Federal Constitution: The Origins of the Bill of Attainder Clause
Brett Palfreyman
Journal of the Early Republic, Fall 2015, Pages 451-473
Abstract:
During American Revolution, rebel state governments adopted bills of attainder to contain and control loyalists, dangerous internal enemies who would apply their blood, treasure, and influence to put down the rebellion. In this extreme form of punitive legislation, state assemblies identified specific Tories by name, judged them guilty of treason, and prescribed a variety of punishments ranging from property confiscation to permanent banishment. Just four years after the war, however, delegates at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia passed an unconditional ban on attainder laws with a unanimous vote and almost no debate. In fact, protection from bills of attainder was one of the handful of individual rights that the Framers included in the actual text of the Constitution. So why the change? Why did so many Americans view bills of attainder as acceptable during the war, then turn around and reject them just a few years later? The Framers’ unanimous decision to ban attainder laws was predicated on two related developments that took place in the aftermath of the Revolution. The first was the peaceful reintegration of loyalists who chose to remain in the states after the war. Once loyalists ceased to pose a special threat, states no longer needed extraordinary measures to manage them. The second was the Framers’ increasing fear that state assemblies had grown too powerful. In this sense, the attainder ban was part of a larger effort to take power away from the people — particularly the alarming power to confiscate private property.
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The Logic of Collective Inaction: Senatorial Delay in Executive Nominations
Ian Ostrander
American Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
While most executive nominees are successfully confirmed, this success masks wide variation in how long it takes the Senate to decide. Delay of critical nominees influences the character and effectiveness of agencies while hampering the policy ambitions of presidents. The exact logic of which nominees are targeted for delay and why, however, remains difficult to uncover. Building on prior literature, this project suggests that delay can be used to protect allied agencies from presidential politicization. Using a data set of several thousand executive nominations from 1987 to 2012, the ideological predisposition of an agency relative to the president is demonstrated to influence senatorial delay. Ultimately, these findings help explain why some nominees are delayed while other, seemingly similar, nominees are not.
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Egil Matsen, Gisle Natvik & Ragnar Torvik
Journal of Development Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We aim to explain petro populism — the excessive use of oil revenues to buy political support. To reap the full gains of natural resource income, politicians need to remain in office over time. Hence, even a rent-seeking incumbent who prioritizes his own welfare above that of citizens, will want to provide voters with goods and services if it promotes his probability of remaining in office. While this incentive benefits citizens under the rule of rent-seekers, it adversely motivates benevolent policymakers to short-term overprovision of goods and services. In equilibrium, politicians of all types indulge in excessive resource extraction, while voters reward policies they realize cannot be sustained over time. Moreover, overextraction might even be reinforced as voters become better informed.
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The Exposure Theory of Access: Why Some Firms Seek More Access to Incumbents than Others
Alexander Fouirnaies & Andrew Hall
Stanford Working Paper, August 2015
Abstract:
Studies of American politics consistently find little link between campaign contributions and electoral and policy outcomes, concluding that donors gain little from donating. Despite this, the donations of access-oriented interest groups continue to generate a large part of incumbents' financial advantage in U.S. legislative campaigns. We argue that we can learn directly about the motivations of interest groups, and indirectly about the possible value that they extract from incumbents, by examining differences in the degree to which they seek access. Specifically, we construct a measure of firm-level exposure to regulation using the text of over 170,000 SEC filings, and we use a variety of empirical techniques to estimate how firms' sensitivity to incumbency varies with exposure. The results indicate that firms seek more access to incumbents when they are more exposed to regulation. Exposure to the effects of policy decisions therefore appears to be an important motivator of firm contribution behavior, suggesting that firms seek access in order to influence policy, and that they benefit, or at the very least believe that they benefit, from doing so.
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Ivan Ermakoff
American Journal of Sociology, July 2015, Pages 64-125
Abstract:
Can we identify and theorize contingency as a property of processes and situations? Applied to social and historical events, contingency denotes a mode of causality characterized by its indeterminate character. Conjunctural causation and period effects lack the specificity required to identify a distinctive class of processes. References to chance happenings offer no clue to analyze endogenous disruptions. Focusing on breaks in patterns of social relations and the role played by individual agency, the author distinguishes four types of impact — pyramidal, pivotal, sequential, and epistemic — and investigates how these relate to the possibility of indeterminacy through an Event Structure Analysis of the night of August 4, 1789, in Versailles. This empirical foray underscores the significance of junctures that are indeterminate with respect to their collective outcomes. The article grounds analytically this class of conjunctures with the concept of mutual uncertainty, gauges the phenomenal scope of this contingency in terms of action domains and group types, contrasts it with the notion of chance events, and draws its implications for the study of social and historical change.
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The DC factor? Advocacy groups in the news
Young Mie Kim & Michael McCluskey
Journalism, August 2015, Pages 791-811
Abstract:
This study examines dynamics among organized interests’ characteristics, the organizations’ strategic activities, and news coverage of organizations’ activities by incorporating theoretical perspectives from group politics and journalism. To examine the relationship among groups’ characteristics, strategic efforts, and news coverage (visibility and prominence), the study combines three large data sets: group profile data (208 US organizations based on the Internal Revenue Service data collected by the National Center for Charitable Statistics), telephone interviews with groups’ executive members (208 randomly sampled organizations nationwide), and content coding of newspaper articles that covered the same organizations (548 newspaper articles). Findings from this study show that the ‘DC factor’, that is, being located in Washington, DC, is consistently a significant factor in explaining the presence of groups in newspapers, even after controlling for group resources, including total revenue. The implications of the findings are discussed.