Suchergebnisse

This paper examines the motivation of political action committees in their campaign contributions. The paper estimates the effect of contributions on the 1996 House of Representatives elections & on the candidates' policy stances. Contributions to challengers have a large impact on election outcomes but incumbent receipts do not. On four of the five issues examined, interest groups responded to candidate positions rather than giving funds to influence them. These results are consistent with an electoral motive for contributions. Some evidence is presented that contributions to incumbents may be given to secure unobservable services for the PAC. 7 Tables, 1 Figure, 1 Appendix, 25 References. Adapted from the source document.

Proposals for campaign finance reform are essentially based on the belief that political influence can be bought with financial donations to a candidate's campaign. But do contributions really influence the decisions of legislators once they are in office? In this brief, Christopher Magee examines the link between campaign donations and legislators' actions. His results suggest that political action committees donate campaign funds to challengers in order to affect the outcome of the election by increasing the challenger's chances of winning. These contributions have a large effect on the election outcome but do not seem to affect challengers' policy stances. In contrast, campaign contributions to incumbents do not raise their chances of being reelected and seem to be given with the hope of gaining influence.

This paper examines political action committees' motivations for giving campaign contributions to candidates for political office. First, the paper estimates the effect of campaign contributions received by candidates on the outcomes of the 1996 elections to the U.S. House of Representatives. Next, the paper uses a Congressional Quarterly survey of candidates' policy positions to determine the impact of contributions on the policy stances adopted by the candidates. The empirical results suggest that political action committees donate campaign funds to challengers in order to affect the outcome of the election. Campaign contributions received by challengers have a large impact on the election outcome but do not affect the challengers' policy stances on any of the five issues examined in this paper. Campaign contributions to incumbents do not raise their chances of election, however, and affect their policy decisions on only one issue. Some evidence is presented that PAC contributions to incumbents may be given primarily in order to secure unobservable services for the political action committees

SummaryThis paper is intended as a guide for policymakers considering new regional trade agreements. The data provided here show that only about a quarter of imports are potentially subject to trade diversion from new agreements (i.e. they come from countries outside of regional trading blocs and in industries with positive most‐favored nation tariffs). Since this percentage is steadily declining with the increasing number of regional trade agreements and the falling level of tariffs, trade diversion is becoming increasingly irrelevant as a concern for new trade deals. The paper also estimates how each potential new bilateral free trade agreement would affect a country's imports and exports, as well as whether the increased imports would replace domestic production, imports from other RTA partners, or imports from non‐RTA partners. In this way, the estimates are able to shed light on which countries make the best partners for new regional trade agreements. Finally, the paper provides estimates of the trade effects for two large potential new regional agreements: the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership and the Trans‐Pacific Partnership.

ObjectiveThis article seeks to explain the puzzle of why incumbents spend so much on campaigns despite most research finding that their spending has almost no effect on voters.MethodsThe article uses ordinary least squares, instrumental variables, and fixed‐effects regression to estimate the impact of incumbent spending on election outcomes. The estimation includes an interaction term between incumbent and challenger spending to allow the effect of incumbent spending to depend on the level of challenger spending.ResultsThe estimation provides strong evidence that spending by the incumbent has a larger positive impact on votes received the more money the challenger spends.ConclusionCampaign spending by incumbents is most valuable in the races where the incumbent faces a serious challenge. Raising large sums of money to be used in close races is thus a rational choice by incumbents.