Campaign Contributions and Legislative Outcomes

Abstract

URING the last ten years there has been a growing public controversy over whether special interest groups use campaign contributions to influence Congress. Some public interest advocates assert that we are perilously close to having the best Congress that money can buy. Spokesman for the organizations making contributions counter by saying that their groups are nothing more than collections of citizens exercising their democratic rights. The limited research thus far performed has uncovered little evidence that a statistically significant relationship exists between the special interest money and legislative outcome. In the first section of this paper I trace the escalation in campaign costs, the dramatic increase in political action committees, and the subsequent debate about the implications of these developments. Then I lay out the conceptual framework which differs in two major ways from previous work in the field. First, I have chosen to focus upon the effect of campaign contributions upon behavior at the committees level instead of upon the House of Representatives as a whole. The committees function as gatekeepers by determining which legislative proposals are considered by the entire House. A crucial first step for lobbyists is to win support at the committee level. Much of the money an interest group gives to candidates is targeted at members of the committee considering legislation relevant to the giver. Therefore, if the money has an effect at all, it is most likely to appear in the behavior of members on committees dealing with legislation affecting those interest groups. Second, I have chosen to study three pieces of interrelated legislation which present very diverse surrounding conditions in terms of pitting interest groups against one another, the degree of public involvement, and intra-industry divisions. This systematic approach allows one to formulate hypotheses testing the conditions under which campaign contributions are likely to have an impact and when they are likely to be overshadowed by other factors such as political ideology, constituency, and seniority.