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Journal of Undergraduate Research

Keywords

legislative voting behavior, vote buying, campaign contributions

College

Family, Home, and Social Sciences

Department

Economics

Abstract

Within the economic and political science literatures, a variety of theoretical models have been developed which attempt to describe the role of campaign contributions in the political process. These models can be separated into two groups, those which employ the assumption that campaign contributions can purchase legislative votes and those which do not. Proponents of this assumption, known as vote buying, argue that legislators reward special interest groups for their campaign contributions by voting on laws in a way that will benefit the contributor. Though widespread, the use of this assumption remains controversial despite many attempts by researchers to examine its validity. The first obstacle faced by these researchers is that, due to the nature of the problem, they are unable to test the hypothesis by performing a controlled experiment. As such, researchers must search for evidence within existing campaign finance and legislative voting data. Using a variety of statistical techniques, early research seemed to confirm the vote buying hypothesis by identifying a statistically significant correlation between campaign contributions and legislative voting behavior. However, these results have come under much criticism due to the possibility that campaign contributions may be what economists refer to as an endogenous variable.

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