Influence Of Special Interest Groups Research Articles

ГРУППЫ СПЕЦИАЛЬНЫХ ИНТЕРЕСОВ В ПРОЦЕССЕ ИНСТИТУЦИОНАЛЬНЫХ ИЗМЕНЕНИЙ НА ПРИМЕРЕ ИНСТИТУТА ВЛАСТИ-СОБСТВЕННОСТИ В РОССИИ

Parallels between the economic development of countries and the results of the actions of their elites are becoming more and more popular, which actualises the research into the areas of influence of special interest groups on the quality of institutions in different states. This study is based on the approach of methodological holism, according to which collectives are viewed as independent economic actors. The article emphasises that institutional change can occur both spontaneously and through the deliberate action of special interest groups. This essay analyses existing approaches to assessing the impact of collective actions on the historical process of institution selection, and considers the institution of power-ownership in Russia as a result of actions of special interest groups that influenced "natural" institution selection and blocked economic development of the country on this sub-optimal institution in order to maintain their redistributive advantages. The authors conclude that radical modification and destruction of this institution is necessary, but note that such changes are practically impossible on the basis of gradual reforms with an attempt to maintain a balance between all parties.

Special Interest Group Influence in School Districts: Exploring the Impact of Locale

ABSTRACT This article explores the research question: How does the nature of interest group influence on school superintendents vary across school district locale/? Utilizing a survey of Wisconsin superintendents, the author tests several hypotheses related to the relationship between school district locale and superintendent perceptions of interest group influence. The results show that Rural/Town superintendents experience more overall interest group pressure, that less formal parent organizations are generally the most dominant interest groups in school districts, and that there are links between interest group pressures and performance.

Think tanks under president Joseph Biden

Unlike the administration of President Donald Trump, who by his nature paid little heed to the assessments of think tank experts, Joseph Biden’s White House has given more attention to the opinions of independent analysts. The conflict in Ukraine has become one of the main discussion topics for American think tanks, and experts are divided. But all the while, the quality of expertise has been diluted because of the influence of special interest groups and lobbyists. Reforms of some sort are needed. This article examines the evolution of the US policy expert community under Biden and its prospects for reform.

The Value of Confidential Policy Information: Persuasion, Transparency, and Influence

Abstract Transparency of the lobbying process is hailed as an effective means to limit the influence of special interest groups, but should transparency also apply to the information obtained by policy makers (PMs)? This article extends theories of informational lobbying by explicitly modeling the choice of PMs to obtain information before interacting with lobbyists. This approach reveals a new channel for the value of confidentiality: extracting evidence from special interest groups. It shows that, counter-intuitively, the influence of special interest groups can increase as PMs become more expert. These results shed light on the relationship between confidentiality, good governance, and influence.

Improving the Match Between Sustainability Questions and Evaluation Practice: Some Reflections and a Checklist

AbstractThere is increasing evaluative interest in assessing not just the current effectiveness of programs but also their likely sustainability. Assessing the likely sustainability of a program, however, requires methodological judgments about the future and about the influences of many complex political, economic, and social factors, which themselves are likely to change. While strong confidence in these types of prospective judgments may continue to be elusive, careful consideration of some major factors—including the cyclical character of certain public interest values and the predictable influence of special interest groups—should be helpful in improving the current ability of evaluation practice to address sustainability issues. This chapter ends with a checklist of seventeen questions to help focus attention on relevant, accessible, but often ignored, program or policy areas affecting sustainability.

'Importing' Restrictions from One Federal Rule of Evidence Provision to Another: The Limits of Legitimate Contextual Interpretation in the Age of Statutes

In 1975, the Federal Rules of Evidence took effect. The basic policy thrust of the Rules was to simplify and liberalize the law of Evidence in federal court. In particular, as the Supreme Court has acknowledged, Federal Rule 402 was intended to deprive the courts of the power to either enforce or enunciate uncodified exclusionary rules. Yet, as Part I of this article demonstrates, in several lines of authority federal courts have relied on contextual interpretation to impose evidentiary restrictions that have no grounding in statutory text. The common fact pattern in these lines of authority is the following: One provision of the Federal Rules contains a restriction, a second provision is silent on the restriction, and the text of neither provision manifests a legislative intent to import the restriction from the first provision into the second. The question naturally arises as to what are the legitimate uses and limits of contextual construction. As Part II explains, the enactment of the Federal Rules roughly coincided with the emergence of the textualist school of statutory interpretation. For formal and practical reasons, textualists assert the primacy of text and caution against uncritical reliance on extrinsic legislative history material. Unlike extrinsic material, legislative text has the formal status of law; and extrinsic history materials are vulnerable to distortion from the influence of special interest groups. The diminished importance of extrinsic history has enhanced the importance of contextual arguments, that is, arguments based on other provisions in the same legislative scheme. After all, like the text being construed, the contextual provisions have the formal force of law. The question of contextual interpretation is not limited to the setting of the Federal Rules of Evidence. More broadly, it affects the construction of all legislation in the Age of Statutes. Part II uses the Federal Rule as a microcosm for exploring the concept of contextual interpretation. On the one hand, Part II identifies several perfectly legitimate uses of contextual interpretation. To begin with, the wording of one provision may be used to eliminate an ambiguity in the wording of a second provision. By way of example, the court may look to the character evidence prohibition codified in Rules 404-45 to inform the meaning of “unfair prejudice” in Rule 403. Moreover, a blanket prohibition on the admission of a certain type of evidence in one provision may necessitate a narrowing construction of another provision that would otherwise permit the introduction of that very type of evidence. Hence, the prohibition of the introduction of evidence of nolo contendere pleas in Rule 410 can require a limiting construction of Rule 801(d)(2)(A) on statements or admissions of a party-opponent. However, when neither of those uses of context is in play, with one exception a court may not simply import a restriction from one provision of the Federal Rules into another. Doing so exceeds the interpretive power of context. Subpart II.B proposes that the importation is justifiable only in the exceptional situation in which the extrinsic legislative history contains an extraordinarily powerful showing of a broad legislative intent to bar the admission of a particular type of evidence, not a narrower intent to prescribe a restriction in one provision of the Federal Rules. Part III uses the standard proposed in subpart II.B to critically evaluate the three lines of authority discussed in Part I. Part III concludes that two of the three lines are flawed; one does not manifest the right type of intent, and the second relies on extrinsic history that is too mixed and conflicted to qualify as an extraordinarily powerful showing of intent. Only one line of authority is based on extrinsic history that includes compelling evidence of an intent to prevent the admission of a certain type of evidence under any theory. Hopefully, this article will not only prevent misreadings of the Federal Rules but also contribute to the larger debate over the proper role of contextual interpretation in the Age of Statutes.

Public opinion and policy responsiveness: the case of same-sex marriage in Australia

ABSTRACTThis article examines congruence between public opinion and politicians’ positions on same-sex marriage in the Australian House of Representatives from 2012 to 2016. In contrast median voter theorem and other office-motivated frameworks, Australian federal politicians have largely ignored majority opinion, which has been supportive of same-sex marriage for a decade. Using a unique dataset (n = 601,550) of voter preferences collected during the 2013 federal election, and collated Hansard and media data, we compare public opinion on same-sex marriage with politicians’ public positions. We find a status quo bias, suggesting the influence of special interest groups in this policy area. Yet, we also find parliamentarians are responsive to public opinion once it reaches a critical level, and that very low opposition to same-sex marriage in an electorate predicts policy support from its MP, which varies by party and over time.

How Outside Spending Shapes American Democracy

This paper examines how lifting a ban on contributions from corporations and unions to groups engaging in outside spending (independent political advertising) affects electoral outcomes, representatives' ideology, and targeted public good provision. Using a differences-in-differences design, we find that removing constraints on the funding of outside spending improves the electoral chances of Republican candidates and leads to more conservative state legislatures. We also provide moderate evidence that these regulatory changes have increased polarization and some types of targeted public good provision. Using a game-theoretic framework, we show that these empirical results are consistent with an increase in the salience of local Republican candidates and (at worst) a moderate decrease in the salience of local Democratic candidates relative to national factors such as partisan tides. Our theoretical and empirical findings provide a first step towards understanding the role outside spending and, more generally, a more complete view of special interest group influence in elections.

Tax Evasion, Tax Avoidance and The Influence of Special Interest Groups: Taxation in Iceland from 1930 to the Present

Abstract This paper focuses on tax evasion and tax avoidance in Iceland, and on how special interest groups have shaped the taxation system to serve their own ends. The period covered is from 1930, when the present Icelandic system of power was established, to the present. Tax evasion is sometimes an intended, and other times an unintended response to taxation.Willful tax evasion is more likely to occur if consensus regarding fairness and equality of the tax-code is lacking. Tax evasion is an integral part of the “underground economy”, or more formally, the Non-Observed Economy (NOE).Measuring the size and scope of the NOE in general, and tax evasion in particular, is a difficult task.We compare results from three methods for estimating the size of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP): the production approach, the expenditure approach, and the income approach. The results of applying these three methods should, in principle, be identical, but they are not. We use the difference, guided by historical facts and anecdotes, to give an idea of the magnitude of tax evasion during the 20th century. We suggest that the construction of the tax system to serve special interest groups may have disrupted the social, judicial, political and economic balance of the Icelandic “project”.

Political Economy of Government Finance in India

This article analyzes important developments in Indian public finance from developmental, redistributive, and political economy perspectives. The detailed analysis of policies relating to tax, expenditure, deficits, and debt brings out the failure of these policies in achieving their objectives, which to a considerable extent is attributable to the constraints posed by political economy developments and particularly, the influence of special interest groups. The analysis of tax policy brings out the low revenue productivity on the one hand and severe distortions caused by it. The analysis of expenditure policy shows the proliferation of subsidies and transfers crowding out productive expenditures on social and physical infrastructure. The analysis of deficits and debt shows the inability of the central government in calibrating sustainable fiscal policies and underlines the need for an independent fiscal institution to monitor the budgetary process and report to the Parliament.

The Effects of Voting Costs on the Democratic Process and Public Finances

Increasing the attractiveness of voting is often seen as a remedy for unequal participation and the influence of special-interest groups on public policy. However, lower voting costs may also bring less informed citizens to the poll, thereby inviting efforts to sway these voters. We substantiate this argument in a probabilistic voting model with campaign contributions. In an empirical analysis for the 26 Swiss cantons, we find that lower voting costs due to postal voting are related to higher turnout, lower average education and political knowledge of participants as well as lower government welfare expenditures and lower business taxation. (JEL D72, H25, H75, I20, I38)

Campaign finance regulations and policy convergence: The role of interest groups and valence

Regulation of campaign finance of political parties and candidates is intended to decrease the political influence of special interest groups and enhance the public interest in electoral outcomes. I investigate empirically the consequences of campaign financing regulations and find that public funding leads parties' platforms to diverge whereas ceilings on individual contributions lead to platform convergence to the median voter outcome. I relate these consequences to differences in valence or intrinsic popularity of parties. I also show that platform divergence is associated with a ban on corporate donations and with requirements of public disclosure of parties' income statements.

Media markets, special interests, and voters

This paper examines the role of mass media in countering special interest group influence. I use the concentration of campaign contributions from Political Action Committees to proxy for special interests' capture of US Senate candidates from 1980 to 2002, and compare the reaction of voters to increases in concentration in two different types of media markets: in-state media markets and out-of-state media markets. Unlike in-state media markets, out-of-state markets focus on neighboring states' politics and elections. Thus, if citizens punish political capture, increases in concentration of special interest contributions to a particular candidate should reduce his vote share in in-state counties relative to the out-of-state counties, where the candidate receives less coverage. I find that a one-standard deviation increase in concentration of special interest contributions to incumbents reduces their vote share by about 0.5 to 1.5percentage points in in-state counties relative to the out-of-state counties. Robustness checks suggest that these results are not driven by omitted Senator characteristics or by differences between in-state and out-of-state counties along dimensions other than the media environment.

The political economy of unfunded public pension liabilities

This paper applies a public choice approach to the problem of unfunded pension liabilities and adopts the methodology of Congleton and Shughart (1990) to model underfunding of state-level public pension plans using the median voter theorem, along with the theory of “capture” by special interest groups, and a combined model of the two. With panel data from 2001 to 2009, the paper finds that the combined model provides the strongest explanation for the current levels of unfunded liabilities; hence, both median voter preferences and special interest group influence are affecting political outcomes. The special interest group model slightly outperforms the median voter model in direct comparisons.

The Dangers of Conformity in Public Education

There is a wide consensus that the U.S. K-12 public education system is in need of fundamental reform. Reformers face two primary barriers to reform; knowledge and incentive problems. Knowledge problems represent the epistemic difficulties inherent in designing a top-down educational system meant to service the educational needs of diverse youth in a rapidly changing economy. The second is the problem of creating an education system that isn’t susceptible to the influence of special interest groups in a contemporary political democracy. We argue that the current public education system is failing precisely because it does not account for these knowledge and incentive problems in its structural design, leading to an educational system that is underperforming, uniform, and susceptible to special interest group pressures. All three outcomes are detrimental to a free society. Decentralized education is necessary for a robust educational system that can deliver quality, adaptable education that isn’t susceptible to special interest group politics.

Media Markets, Special Interests, and Voters

This paper examines the role of mass media in countering special interest group influence. I use the concentration of campaign contributions from Political Action Committees to proxy special interests’ capture US Senate candidates from 1980 to 2002, and compare the reaction of voters to increases in concentration in two different types of media markets – in-state media markets and out-of-state media markets. Unlike in-state media markets, out-of-state markets focus on neighboring states’ politics and elections. Thus, if citizens punish political capture, increases in concentration of special interest contributions to a particular candidate should reduce his vote share in in-state counties relative to the out-of-state counties, where the candidate receives less coverage. I find that a one standard deviation increase in concentration of special interest contributions to incumbents reduces their vote share by about 0.5 to 1.5 percentage points in in-state counties relative to the out-of-state counties. Results are similar in specifications that rely solely on variation in concentration across time within the same county, and when the sample is limited to in-state counties that are contiguous to out-of-state counties and have similar demographic structures. A placebo test where in-state counties bordering out-of-state ones are compared to other in-state counties shows no effect, confirming the identification hypothesis that the results are not driven by geographic characteristics or distance from the media center of the state.

Finance and politics: the wealth effects of special interest group influence during the nationalisation and privatisation of Conrail

Conrail, nationalised in 1976 and privatised in 1987, was the most significant nationalisation and privatisation by the US government in recent years. It was created from six bankrupt railroads under the pressure of interest groups, formed by customers, existing claimants, employees and related companies. We document the gains and losses to these special interest groups at key points in the nationalised and privatised time periods. Over this period, the US government had outlays of $6.59 billion, and cash inflow of $6.15 billion, and internal return of −6.4%. The paper provides evidence that a state-owned firm with good governance could deliver superior performance.

Minding the Public Purse: The Fiscal Crisis, Political Trade-offs, and Canada's Future (review)

Reviewed by: Minding the Public Purse: The Fiscal Crisis, Political Trade-offs, and Canada's Future Christopher Bruce Minding the Public Purse: The Fiscal Crisis, Political Trade-offs, and Canada's Future. Janice Mackinnon. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2003. Pp. xiv, 316. $44.95 In 1991, Janice MacKinnon, an academic historian with little political experience, was parachuted into a safe NDP seat as part of Roy Romanow's promise to increase female representation in the Saskatchewan legislature. She was immediately named to cabinet as minister of social services, and within two years was promoted to minister of finance. In this book, she sets out to provide an insider's look at how provincial and federal governments dealt with the debt crisis of the 1990s. What I found to be the most interesting aspect of the book - a view that she seems to share herself - was the stark contrast between the approaches taken by her government and that of Alberta. Whereas Alberta was driven by the ideological premise that smaller government was better, Saskatchewan clearly took the view that government was both a protector of, and provider for, its citizens. Whereas the Alberta government went to great lengths to publicize the extent of its debt problems, in order to justify its dramatic restructuring policies, Saskatchewan's politicians were dragged into five years of budget cuts only when threatened with financial disaster. [End Page 641] Whereas Jim Dinning chopped and slashed with the enthusiasm of the Red Queen 'cutting off their heads,' Janice MacKinnon resembled the Walrus, crying as each rural hospital was closed, as each agricultural subsidy was sacrificed. But where the two provinces differed most significantly was in the theoretical underpinnings of their policies. Whatever one might think of the ideological motivation for the 'Klein revolution,' it is undeniable that his government had a well-conceived battle plan based on the extensive literature on 'reinventing government.' Although Alberta cut budgets, it simultaneously introduced measures to maintain the level of services by encouraging agencies to increase efficiency. Among many other policies, the number of hospital boards was reduced dramatically; some services were privatized; charter schools were encouraged, to create competition; key performance indicators were introduced; some regulatory functions were turned over to industry groups; and the internal budgeting process was revised to restrict the influence of special interest groups. In contrast, Ms. MacKinnon provides few, if any, examples of a plan any deeper than 'reduce the deficit to zero within four years.' Indeed, she notes herself that 'moving beyond promoting efficiency to experimenting with innovative ways of delivering services represented an ideological fork in the road' (137) - a fork at which Alberta and New Brunswick took one turning, while Saskatchewan took the other. It appears that left-wing governments, such as hers, were not willing to contemplate the possibility that government agencies might be inefficient. And because they were efficient already, there was no point trying to improve them. As a result, as Ms. MacKinnon describes it, Saskatchewan's budgetary changes were restricted primarily to cuts, not to restructuring. Of course, it is possible that Saskatchewan did have a deeper plan behind its budget-cutting exercises and that Ms. MacKinnon chose not to reveal it. This is a real possibility, as I found that the greatest weakness in this book was that it treated economic issues superficially. At times the reader is given the impression that Ms. MacKinnon saw her role less as the guardian of the Saskatchewan economic system than as a player in a political game - in which the primary purpose was to score points off one's political adversaries. Ms. MacKinnon's conversion from spendthrift socialist to fiscal conservative appears to have occurred virtually overnight, and with little explanation. For example, instead of providing arguments to convince the reader that the left wing of the NDP was wrong when it contended that 'the fiscal crisis was a phantom conjured up by right-wing governments' (136), or that the government's best policy was to renege on its debt, she merely asserts that proponents of these views were wrong. [End Page 642] The result is that although I found the first two-thirds of this...

The Market Response to Restructuring: A Behavioral Model

In this paper, I model the behavior of producers, consumers, and regulators in deciding to restructure the electricity sector and estimate their equilibrium response to the newly restructured market. The empirical model consists of simultaneous price and restructuring equations with endogenous switching and cross-equation correlation in the errors. This approach allow me to account for the influence of special interest groups and potential selection bias in which countries choose to restructure. I estimate distinct shifts from restructuring in both industrial and residential prices, and for English speaking, Scandinavian, and South American countries. I find that in all countries, it is industrial consumers that experience the price effects of restructuring, while residential consumers remain largely unaffected. In English speaking and Scandinavian countries, industrial prices decrease while in South American countries they increase. This is consistent with the political–economic environment in which these countries have considered restructuring.

Voting With Our Forks

Voting With Our Forks