Today's brown bag is going to be led by Pete Calcagno. He's going to be looking at
PAC money and campaign contributions.
The paper I want to discuss today, the topic really comes from a paper that I worked on
with Professor Jackson, and this is really the outline. And this paper is, we put together
are a sort of an econometric model of looking at political action committee spending and
Senate roll call voting and try to investigate the correlation between the two.
I'm not going to get into all the econometrics obviously today and just appeal to more of
the anecdotal and historical evidence because I think this model is rather intuitive in
its nature and very appealing in that way and I think a lot of the historical evidence
This makes a strong case. This is a public choice kind of argument that we make here.
Voting as a rule and voting models in the public choice literature,
how many of them have looked at election voting and committee voting,
election voting concentrating on things that we usually talk about with individuals.
We assume that voters are rationally ignorant and that they don't have a lot of incentive to be well informed.
Where committee voting has sort of emphasized issues like preference ordering, the size of the groups and agenda control.
And what we do is, of course, we look at politicians in a public choice perspective as just rationally self-interested individuals just like anyone else.
We wanted to look at the question is, what motivates senator to vote? What motivations are there, aside from the fact that, you know, in serving this position, they're supposed to have an obligation to be contributing to literature.
In particular, what role do PACs play in how often and how they vote?
Voting on the Senate floor, we looked at the Senate in particular just because it is a smaller body.
can occur in three ways. It can voice what they call division voting, which is standing,
and roll call voting. Only roll call voting, though, are actually recorded with individual
accountability to the senators, so that's why we concentrated on roll call voting. And
what we say, what we argue is that, you know, senators don't have the same incentives in
and the voting structure that individuals have, right?
Senators don't want to be ignorant of the issues, right?
They want to be aware of what's going on.
Their individual vote may count a lot more than, you know, the average voter in an election
and also that they vote a lot more frequently than do regular voters.
These are all issues that sort of help us to look at this more, look at this aspect
and within the idea of committee voting rather than election voting.
Some of the history here is in 71 Congress passed Federal Act Elections Campaign Act
and in 74 they amended it to allow for the existence of PACS.
And according to a paper by Greer and Munger, PACS ever since they've become legal their
Their influence has just been growing remarkably.
There were only 608 PACs in existence in 1974 when this came in, when they became legal,
and their number increased to 1,146 within two years.
And as of 1990, there were 4,172 PACs registered with the Federal Election Committee, as we're
talking only 16 years and sevenfold, you know, increased by seven times.
and Spending risen just as quickly from 34.1 million in 1978 to 149.7 million in 1990.
Most of the approaches that have looked at and concentrated on PACs and what impact PACs
have on voting and on outcomes of the legislature have sort of analyzed, have taken two approaches.
The first approach is to look at PACs and say who do PACs contribute to? What explains
how PACs contribute, how they make their contributions? And the other sort of standard literature
has looked at the idea of PACs and do they actually have outcomes, do they actually have
an impact on the legislation that's being passed? Can they influence the legislation?
And some of the literature has argued for a more general approach and that's exactly
So what we do is we take a more general approach here, and not looking at seeing whether or not PACs can actually influence the outcome of a vote or a piece of legislation.
But that PACs, in making contributions, are really just trying to get access, if you will, to a Senator, so that they can appeal to them to vote in their favor.
So we take a little more of a general approach. They're not necessarily trying to get this outcome in a certain way.
They at least are trying to get in access and persuade that individual senator to vote in their favor.
Anthony Downs, who's obviously the most famous economist in this area and one of the first,
was the first to suggest that politicians are vote maximizers.
But that's what they want to do. They want to maximize the votes that they can get in re-election, right?
They want to assure the re-election.
And most of the literature that's been written in this area has sort of taken that hard as a premise that, you know, politicians are vote maximizers.
Well, in 89, Glenn Parker wrote a paper suggesting that politicians and incumbents are fairly secure in their, they're pretty secure in their seats and are maximizing something other than maybe the votes they can get to the next re-election and they're maximizing perhaps income, prestige, power that goes along with the office and that no longer is just, you know, the election itself, the end, but merely
This is merely a means to an end, and if that's the case, we sort of build on this premise the idea is that politicians that are going to try and maximize the income they can receive or the rents that they can extract from being in office, subject to just appealing to their constituents enough to stay in office, and so again elections are no longer an answer themselves, just merely a means to an end.
Well, in addition to this idea, there have been some papers, again, that suggest on how PACs make their contributions.
And what they found is that PACs are going to make contributions to the senators with the lowest opportunity cost of supplying their vote.
Which makes perfect sense from a rational standpoint.
So, you're not going to, the PACs aren't going to give the big bucks to well-known politicians
whose positions are well-known.
Your goal and where you want to try to have the most influence is on a senator who has
a very low opportunity cost of supplying the vote.
There's a paper by Thomas Stratman where he looks at farm PACs and he looks and comes
comes up with the idea that it's the senators or it's the members of congress who don't
have, it's not the members of congress that have farming as a big industry in their state
that get all the money and it's not the senators who don't have any farming interests that
get the money but the ones in the middle who can vote this without upsetting their constituency
So, PACs are going to look for senators who have very low opportunity costs to supply in
their vote.
There have been a lot of things, now voting participation in the Senate has been increasing
since the legalization of PACS, and some people have made the observation that this increase
in Senate participation is due to the fact that they keep winning elections by very narrow
margins, that incumbents are winning elections by very narrow margins.
There are sort of two things that sort of call this into question.
If you look at over recent years, the last decade or so, incumbents have been being re-elected
in higher proportions than they were 20 or 40 years ago, and that if Senate voting participation
then is really a key to seeing wider margins of victory, then if they're voting higher,
we should see wider margins of victory, and that hasn't been the case.
Rather, we suggest that incumbents are going to continue to win by narrow margins, following
this idea put out by Parker, that they're willing to expend surplus votes in order to
get PAC contributions so that they can pursue their own ends.
Now, some of the trends in voting participation are kind of interesting.
We looked at two periods, a period prior to the creation of PACS, particularly in the years 1958 and 1960, those two Senates, and then 1988 and 1990.
So you've got a very range here in terms of the number of years that have gone by, which sort of allows PACS to mature as an institution so that we can see differences in these two periods.
And between 1950 and 60, over that decade, voting participation was pretty constant at about 87%.
It was fairly constant over that period.
And in 1975, a year after Senate roll call voting, or after PACS became legal, voting participation hit a record high of 91%.
From 75 to 80, roll call voting never fell below 86% and reached in 1990 a record high of 97%.
So it's been steadily increasing since the legalization of PACS.
This is the number of votes that are roll call votes or the number of participation in the roll call?
This is the participation in the roll call votes by the senators.
How long is your time series?
The number of roll call votes that they have have reached highs of 602, 688, 635, 75, 76, 77, those were all record highs.
And if you look over a period, two 20-year periods, or roughly 20-year periods, 47 to 69, and 70 to 90,
and you compare those there's only been four occasions where there have been fewer votes
in the 70 to 90 period than there were in the 47 to 69 period so there have been a number of votes
that are occurring has been increasing as well. But is the percentage
The image of voting, that is, roll call increasing, in other words, are they calling for the roll,
are more and more votes, or do they stop using these other...?
It seems to be.
It's hard to say for sure.
That's part of the problem with this, in that since roll call votes are the only votes that
that are officially recorded. They do standing votes and they do voice votes, but there's
no actual record of those other than, say, an outcome. And if you look up where I got
this data, which is out of Congressional Quarterly, and they say the votes, the number of times
the Senate voted on bills or whatever, they only list the roll call votes. So the impression
The impression that we're getting is that they are voting in a roll call fashion more often.
We can't say with 100% certainty, but that's the impression that we're getting.
And the idea here is that I think that senators want that individual accountability.
They want their presence to be known that they're out there voting.
This can kind of go both ways.
You can look at the situation where if a senator is actively participating in roll call votes and PACs realize this,
then they may view it as an opportunity to meet with that candidate and make a contribution to them
because they know that that senator is always there and is usually present at roll call votes.
Similarly, once a PAC makes a contribution to a Senator, they have a lot of incentive to be on the floor and vote to represent that PAC.
So it kind of goes both ways.
And it's interesting, there's a lot of evidence that suggests that there is a lot of incumbent security starting in the 1960s
as they made a lot of changes in laws regarding campaign contributions and stuff and campaign financing that have made it harder for incumbents to be challenged.
I think you had mentioned that the other day, I think, and we were talking about Senate, just the running for election, actually it was, but Mark and Bill and I were talking about the soft money that comes in, rolls in from the parties, and that's very hard to get money, you know, if you're just a candidate coming out of nowhere, if you're not represented by one of the main two parties, that they've got some sort of soft money flowing in, that incumbents have a lot of, a lot of security, you know,
The idea here is that it's very rational for senators to want to participate then in more
rule-called voting so that they can extract these rents, so that they can make it, as
I said, themselves visible to PACs, so that PACs will want to get access to them and make
contributions. So they benefit in roll call voting by being able to extract these
rents. And you know we can't say whether or not this is actually influencing the
outcome of elections. We take a much simpler approach in that you know like I
said most of the literature has tried to determine whether or not PACs actually
affect the outcome of legislation. We don't go that far but we do say that
they aren't. It appears they're definitely buying voting
Participation. They're buying their representative to be out there on the floor, making their
case and voting in their favor. What it amounts to is that we see a change then in senators
in a couple of ways. They have a lot more discretionary power, a lot more discretionary
Discretionary power away from their parties. If we look at the data from the early periods,
political parties played a lot bigger role in how senators voted. They sort of, you know,
followed the party line a lot more closely. When you get the hacks coming into the picture,
they ease off and they have a little more discretionary power. They don't have to always
follow the party line. Also, again, you don't see them having to favor their constituency
There's a bunch of interesting issues, I think, that sort of come out with this.
Greg Dempster and Chris Wesley are working on a paper right now that looks at PAC contributions
and whether or not that affects how moderate a candidate tries to make themselves appear.
I think there's something to be said there that sort of appeals with this is that you want to have a low opportunity cost of supplying your boat, you want to look very moderate, you want to look sort of middle of the road, you're not a hard line, you're not going to favor the farmers, you're not a hard line, we need agricultural support and we need to get rid of it, we need to get rid of all agricultural support. You want to put yourself in the middle so that you can appeal and get these contributions.
An interesting article and a recent issue of Reason Magazine on Washington, in Washington Change, by Jonathan Rausch, and he makes an interesting point that I think appeals, at least sort of implicitly, to the point I'm trying to make here, and if you'll bear with me for a second, I wanted to read something to you.
The public despises government, and it desires reforms, at least in principle, yet there appears, at least at present, to be no path from here to there.
Nonsense, says Grubbe-Wayne Populist. The problem is that Washington isn't listening to the American people. It's too busy with its partisan bickering to get anything done. It's out of touch and gridlock. That's the problem.
and he goes on to say, actually that's not the problem, neither out of touchness nor gridlock is anything like the real problem, to think of Washington's mess in those terms, as most of the public does, is to rush off in the wrong direction, American politics has never been more responsive indeed, more capricious than it is now, Washington has never been more eager to react to every passing electoral mood, angry this week about immigrants, wages, gas prices, beef prices, a bomb, a reset of his childhood,
You can be sure that a bill will be on the floor of Congress tomorrow, if not sooner.
And I think that this idea goes a long way with the argument that I'm trying to make,
is that senators are very quick to respond, and he goes on to say that it's special interest
groups here that are pushing these things.
And so senators are willing to very actively participate and get out on the floor and issue
I hate to imply that politicians would be honest, but once a politician gets money from a particular pack, are there instances where he would get money from both sides?
I would assume, sure. Bill and I were talking yesterday. It wasn't yesterday, Bill, that
was it Senate or it was in Congress, you said that there was a guy who had received money
from a particular lobby group and he was out on the floor and he was saying that they needed
to destroy this bill, that they needed to not vote this way. And one of the congressmen
called him on it and said, look, I know you got money from them, at least be honest enough
It's kind of like Al Gore, he all of a sudden has turned into an anti-tobacco crusader but back in 88 he was standing before the tobacco growers bragging about how he had cut tobacco and he'd worked in the fields and his family's got tobacco money all these years, it's to a certain extent I think that they will do that if they really think the wind is blowing
in the other direction. These guys will suddenly have a midnight conversion, but...
Well, it's just, again, it's this whole idea, and I think this is a really interesting paper that Chris and Greg are working on, this whole idea of being moderate, right?
And again, you know, this idea that you can stay away from, you know, PACs have allowed senators in particular to be able to steer away from the clear party line.
The interesting question he may be asking is, given the data set that you have, could you and Professor Jackson calculate the half-life, the half-doubts, and that would be pretty interesting, I think.
I don't know exactly, that would call, that would require more of finding out, you know, we used percentage of PACs, percentage of money that they received from PACs out of their whole campaign contributions to do what you're saying would actually, you know, you have to go back and disaggregate sort of and find out the particular PACs and find out how they voted on particular issues. It could be done, I think. And it's an interesting question.
and so forth.
As the more moderate they seem, well, I can just go with the wind and then I constantly
have pack money reassuring that that half-life hasn't expired.
So I think it's a really neat time for it.
I wanted to, I didn't want to repeat the time, but your inquiry about the number of roll call
votes that have been increasing, I know when I've looked at the voting on the National
of the Arts, they're definitely increasing. The original 1965 legislation was passed to
both houses by just a simple voice vote, and then the first roll call vote in the Senate was 1973,
and if you trace the votes, the last few votes, all of them have been roll call votes, and so I know I mean
that has become more of a heightened political football, so that would probably tend to
sling part of it, but just in that instance the votes have become more of a roll call vote.
That's the impression they've gotten, and one of the referees' comments was if we could
discern our roll call votes being used more than voice or standing, and because all you
get is an outcome with a standing vote saying that Congress passed this, and they don't
say necessarily how, you know...
They don't even record who was as a voice vote.
Exactly.
You've got no way to discern what percentage of total votes that they did were roll call
versus others, but the impression is, as you said, that they are increasing, and because
they want to be accountable, they want to be visible.
When you think about it though, when I was at the Libertarian Convention we had voice
votes, division votes, roll call votes, all different kinds of votes, but when you think
about the Congress nowadays, I don't ever remember seeing them all in the same room
They don't seem to have those kind of votes, you know, voice votes or division votes anymore at all.
They have to ring the buzzer or whatever and tell everybody to come in.
I think as long as the quorum's present, the quorum's present, the voice vote will stand.
Well, they assumed that there's a quorum present.
I'm thinking that PACS just resulted from a loophole in the law that limited individual
The case that it actually comes out of is
Pipefitter's local number 52 versus the United States and this was a union group that was trying to make a contribution
to politicians, and it got appealed, and the courts came down and said,
look, this is perfectly legitimate. And so, prior to that, the idea is that,
it's not like this didn't happen, but rather prior to this, the unions might give the money
to their members and say you know look this is our guy you know make these contributions to him that's
that's what's been suggested in the literature that you know this sort of made made sub rosa that
you know from the from the union i'm going to take money and i'm going to you all are union members
i'm going to give you all a little bit of money and you each individually as individuals are going
to make contributions to the person that we expect to support our legislation. Right so PACS
Why would a PAC cause these politicians to respond in the way that you describe, whereas
in the days before campaign limitations on campaign contributions, they didn't?
Well I mean I think it goes to the ideas of, you know, just the basic sort of catcher theory
public choice argument you know you've got a very narrowly defined group who
are receiving the benefits and it's very clear you know if you pass a piece of
legislation that this special interest group is going to benefit you know and
the costs are very widely dispersed and where you know back before these you
know special interest groups could get together in this way and make large
contributions they weren't as well defined and so you had to pay more
to pay more attention to your constituents and had to be worried about being a vote maximizer
and making sure that you were satisfying your constituency so that you could stay in office.
Again, it's allowed for a lot more discretionary power, but what it's gone ahead and done is defined very specifically
if you pass a piece of legislation, who you're going to make happy.
In this article in the Reason magazine, he goes on to say that everybody likes to talk about cutting Washington and everybody's upset with Washington.
We need to cut, we need to reform, just don't cut my benefits, just don't cut things that are going to influence me.
AARP is all, you know, would say, numbers of AARP would say, let's cut government, but let's not touch Social Security, let's not touch Medicare, let's not touch, you know, and it's just, his point here is that, you know,
Sounds like a gold campaign speech.
You know, his point is that no one wants to cut the interest, you know, their own special interest groups, they want to cut everybody else's, which is a problem that we've seen for a long time.
I notice in this particular election that the facts tend to also be playing both sides of the fence.
That fact behavior doesn't evolve always just given to one particular candidate who they think can build the goods.
But for example, even some of the most left-wing Democrats have been getting business money again this year,
where they did a couple of years ago.
My guess is that these guys are not going to change.
I can't all of a sudden imagine Ron Dellums starting to vote, you know, like Jesse Helms or something, but is there, this analysis that you've been making, is this behavior fit for you?
Well, I think it does in the sense that, only in the sense that, like I said, following sort of Stratton's argument that you want to put yourself right there in the middle.
and I think it's appealing to politicians to be a Democrat who
supports business you know it's you know Democrats have got this reputation of
being anti-business and Republicans have this reputation of being pro-business
and if you are a Democrat who is pro-business you can present yourself as
sort of a novelty and say look you know I've got my Democratic
The Democrats are going to vote pro-business, it's just enough that they are going to at
at least be participating more in these votes, they're not going to be absent as much because
they want to, they want that visibility. And if these PACs are paying them, then they are,
Gary Becker in his paper on competition among pressure groups suggests that, you know, PACs
The facts are just like anything else. If a politician isn't representing them well, they will get rid of them.
They know that they will fire that politician and find someone who can get the job done.
That's Becker's analysis and that's the best you can suggest at this point.
And I guess it's, yeah, we were also looking at some form of extortion, I guess it's what you do if you give Charlie Langale a few thousand dollars, which is the ideal, or maybe he won't try to put me out of business altogether, or maybe he won't tax what, all my salary or something?
Tax. There's an interesting paper by Fred Michesny. The title of it at the moment escapes
me. But he talks about rent extraction in this paper and this idea of what he refers
to as Milker bills, where politicians introduce legislation that they know isn't going to
The Senate is going to pass, but it will cause a scare.
It will cause a scare, something to say, the Senate is going to propose a 15% income tax increase.
There is no way it is going to ever make it past the Senate.
But it immediately allows senators to get out there and say,
I will make sure that this will get defeated.
I promise you this bill will never make it out of the Senate.
and it allows them to get all kinds of support and contributions
and they know it's not going to, it's not going to make it out of the Senate in the first place
and there's very little effort involved
and it's purely just sort of what he refers to as a rent extraction, scares them into
contributing. One of the biggest examples of that kind of
legislation is tax reform
and the tax reform committees are always announcing their various plans and bills that they're
going to introduce and that sort of thing and of course that immediately generates all
sorts of money flowing into the tax writing committees on both sides because they want
to create, people either want the tax reform to get new deductions or rate changes or they
want to defeat all those deductions and rate changes.
When you saw the takeover of the Republican Congress in 1994, you also saw, in conjunction
with that, all these new grand and glorious plans to reform the tax code, and so all these
new people controlling these new committees, or new people controlling the committees,
created this new legislation.
The money started rolling in, in record numbers, and instead of being second fiddle, the republicans became huge money gainers in the congress, and none of those bills went anywhere.
I mean, they never came up there, never discussed, it was just, you know.
I mean, I think all of us in this room were, you know, almost 100% confident that a flat tax was never going to come about.
but if you look at how much press and everything else that generated and I'm
sure that they were you know on both sides of it like you said politicians
that got you know lots of contributions to ensure that that never happened you
know that they were was going to come to be and I don't think there was any real
ever really any threat of that you know that happening
I have another question, and it doesn't sound like your time series goes that far enough,
but it's interesting to me to think about the accountability factor.
It seems like you have a nice 0-1 dummy variable you could use with the Seventeenth Amendment.
Did there come about more roll calls once senators were being elected by the people?
And I think that if you wanted to make an argument or see whether or not those roll calls matter,
In my mind, and I don't even know the 17 minute past, 19, 20, 21 or 20, but, you know, it would certainly lend credence to your argument if you see more folks, you know, owing for and having the loopholes at the same time.
the formation of PACs and just the whole special interest groups makes note of the 17th Amendment
and this idea of trying to get, you know, that there were a lot of special interest
groups that, you know, pushed for that, you know, a lot of local unions and things, you
know, that wanted to get it in the hands of the people as opposed to, you know, their
and Interstate Representatives, and they, a lot of people point to that as a starting point for this whole trend which has happened over, you know, the last 70 some odd years, you know, and, and just sort of keeps, keeps going. There was a, you know, but this idea of, yeah, as far as the, you know,
The formalities of the legal structure, I don't know as well, and we picked the years that we did because of being able to get the data very nicely and stuff,
and picked the years that we did because, like I said, in 1958, I'm sure no one anticipated PACS becoming legal,
and by 1990 you know they were well established and you know there was some
comment about the fact that maybe we should have a time series here rather
than two cross-sections but you know the the thing is and this would be an
interesting I think paper in and of itself is if you look at Sugar Tolson
and their paper on dissemination of information, this idea that over time this process, I don't
know that that time series would demonstrate as clearly this trend, I mean it would, but
it may not be as obvious as if we look at two snapshots, that there has to be time for
this information to sink in and for this institutional arrangement to sort of take hold and politicians
is Realizing what exactly it is that they can do and, you know, what's out there available
to them.
So PACS came in in the early 70s, right?
Mid-70s, yeah.
Mid-70s.
Okay, so that must have been, I'm trying to get this straight in my mind, it used to be
that you could donate to politicians and it was tax-deductible and everybody made individual
contributions and then in 72 they started regulating, they had the Federal Elections
Commission. Yeah, that came out the first 71. That must have been when all this PAC thing started.
Yeah, it started in the Federal Election Campaign Act was passed originally in 71. And that put a
lot of the restrictions, as you said, on campaign contributions and accountability of individuals
for contributions. And by 74, they had amended it because of this case with us, this pipe fitters
Union, who took it in on court that, so that, you know, special interest groups or political
action committees could make contributions as a group to politicians.
You seem to be arguing with the evidence that, you know, with participation and roll call
and people being, you know, held accountable for their voting and all that stuff, it seems
almost like you're making an argument that this is a good thing, that this is improving
things in some sense that there's all this accountability and that kind of stuff. Would you characterize it that way?
Anything that makes Washington more active in my mind is never a good thing.
Dr. Yeager in his political economy class is always saying, you shouldn't vote. It only encourages them.
Bill and I have talked about it in other ways and sort of extended on this and said you know don't pay them, it only encourages them to vote you know so you know I don't I don't think this is a you know if you look at if you look at Becker's perspective you know Becker and his competition among pressure groups takes a very you know traditional Chicago approach that if we let pressure groups compete
Among Themselves, only the most efficient, you know, PACs are going to be the ones left out,
are going to be the ones that are there, and, you know, they are going to be the ones that
are very small number, they can control their members, and they can be very influential.
And like he says, you know, they are going to be able to get politicians to represent
their interests, and if they're not, they're going to find the politicians that can.
And he suggests that it is a good thing.
I would never suggest that we need some sort of federal regulation to restrict hacks and how they make their contributions.
I don't think that's in any way, shape or form a solution.
It is an institutional arrangement and the incentives have to be restructured.
How exactly to do that, I'm not sure, because I wouldn't want to institute more federal regulation
Dictating how these contributions can and should be made, which is a proposal.
Can you speculate on what would be the consequences of things like that?
Let's just say all elections were financed entirely by public money and private money were forbidden.
I think it would be amazingly dangerous.
You've got accountability to almost nobody then. Right now, the idea is that you still have, at least marginally, you have to be accountable to your constituency and that you are accountable to PACs, so you've got two constraints there on a politician's behavior right now.
I think that would almost release these constraints altogether and politicians would be able to go with any whim that they saw fit because there's going to be no consequences for their actions.
They're going to get this money, you know, a certain percentage I think is how it's been proposed, regardless.
And there's going to be little to no consequences of their actions.
Do you think you can see that further locking out of third parties?
Oh, most definitely. I think, you know, I think that, you know, any time there's any kind of, you know,
you know, they want to keep it right now. I mean, we see this right now that all the soft money is going to flow to, you know,
parties are very much want to be in control of the candidates that they have.
is a negative impact, and it's all on third parties, grassroots organizations. There may be an article on that in that same issue there, I'm not sure, of Reason Magazine, where the Federal Elections Commission's overall regulations and reporting requirements, of course, only come down hardest on challengers, independents, third parties, grassroots organizations.
It's, the accounting process is very expensive, but also you can sort of stymie your opponent
simply by calling the Federal Western Commission and saying, hey, he's, you know, he's doing
something wrong, you better check in on it.
There's a lawsuit, you know, big negative, but the major parties can get around all of
these restrictions.
They have lawyers to fill out the forms and so it's, and also with respect to challengers
and Independence and Third Parties. The fact that you have to report who is donating money
to your campaign makes it more difficult to get people to donate money to your campaign.
If you're an abortion rights person or some controversial candidate, somebody wants to
support you, but they don't want to support you if their name is going to be reported
and Made Public. And so, again, as in most cases, the regulation stymies competition
rather than in some way regulating it. And one of the biggest examples of this, in terms
of keeping people out of the system, is the fact that individuals are limited to a thousand
dollars. Packs can basically spend zillions of dollars because they're organized in such
So it's basically, there's a big hurdle there. Once you decide to run or to start up a grassroots organization, you either are nothing or you become a huge special interest group, basically.
There's no reform of theory.
Yeah, the regulation hurts the new entrants, basically.
and that's that's part of what you know Parker suggests and that that is the
incumbents feel that much more secure because they've got these kinds of you
know campaigning federal campaign contribution restrictions and has really
that's what he says that's what he argues this change primarily occurred
and you see you know you've seen this this change in the way senators behave in
terms of maximizing no longer maximizing votes but maximizing income I think a
another paper if you have not read it, the site is kind of a contolison of the legislature.
Yeah. That's an inedited volume isn't it? Or is it? Or they have an edited volume.
It seems logical to me that the most powerful committee chairman would get the most tax. Would that be true or not true?
Well, it's kind of interesting. We looked at committee chairs, and because we looked at the Senate, that's not necessarily the case.
Senate, because the Senate is a much smaller number, it's very easy for a Senator to get on the floor and get their position noted.
In the House, on the other hand, I would think, we didn't look at the House, but I think if you did, you'd find that that's the case.
We actually included a dummy variable in there with whether or not, we had two variables.
One was the number of committees that a politician was on, and the other was a dummy variable to account for whether or not they were a committee chair.
And we found that committee chair didn't have any impact.
And again, I think the idea is that because the Senate is so small...
Everybody's a chairman.
Yeah, you know, everybody can sort of get their voice heard where in the Senate or in the House,
the ones that, you know, generally can get the floor and the ones that do have the most
impact are the committee chairs. Committees rule the House a lot more than in the Senate.
Because I was thinking if that were true, there'd be tremendous pressure to do
Why can't I get it right away so I can get all this money?
Yeah, there's a number of things that would suggest that, you know, seniority rules.
We looked at how long a senator had been in office, and that is, the longer you've been
and you know about how the system works and you can better appeal to individuals, you
know how the process works and you know exactly what the costs are of missing a vote and we
found that that's the case.
Also the idea is that the closer you get to retiring, the less you care about, the less
One final speculation here, Pete. The new rule that says you can no longer keep your, take it with you, so to speak, when you take your campaign war chest home, I guess you get to spend it in some way or another, but you can no longer use it for your personal uses.
Just one final speculation. Would that have any effect on this process that you've been discovering or been looking at?
Offhand, I'm not exactly sure. I think this sort of, my gut instinct is to kind of go along with this.
And the other thing that I think sort of goes hand in hand with this is the idea of term limits.
and I think in both cases it only heightens the incentives and the institutional arrangements that are there
and they have all the incentives to spend more of this money and to extract as much rent as they can and as quickly as they can
because they've only got a set amount of time to be there in a pillage and plunder very quickly
very quickly because you're not going to be able to be there for long that that's sort of my gut reaction
to that idea you know you can't take it with you then you better better get it now
okay well thank you very much pete i enjoyed it