Political Party Purpose, Individual Votes, and Political Action Committee Contributions

Abstract

The authors use two different data sources to confront the questton of whether a party's primary economic purpose is to sell spectal favors or alternatively to provide information and serve as an ideological label. Although not denying the proposition that politicians sell special favors, it does present results consistent with the subordination of favor specialization to ideological specialization. Besides referring to earlier published results, this article analyzes individual voting data in presiden tial and congressional elections in the United States and contributions by groups of individuals and types of special interest classes to incumbent members of the U.S. Senate and House. These results also imply that there is no need to assume differential abilities to provide favors to special interest groups to explain differential success rates in more or less aggregated political jurisdictions.