Buying Time: Moneyed Interests and the Mobilization of Bias in Congressional Committees
Introduction
Moneyed interests are seen as dominating the legislative process in Congress.
Research on campaign contributions and floor voting provides little supporting evidence.
The study suggests:
Group expenditures are more likely to appear in committee than on the floor.
Members' legislative involvement, not their votes, is most likely affected.
Analysis provides solid support for the importance of moneyed interests in the legislative process.
Members are more responsive to organized business interests within their districts than to unorganized voters.
Concerns about Organized Interests
Critics have long worried about the influence of organized interests in national policy making.
E.E. Schattschneider warned of inequalities between:
Private, organized, and upper-class groups
Public, unorganized, and lower-class groups
Pressure system "mobilized bias" in national policy making in favor of the former.
Growth in political action committees (PACs) has refueled the charge that moneyed interests dominate policy making.
Scientific Evidence on Political Money
Scientific evidence that political money matters in legislative decision making is surprisingly weak.
Research on members' voting decisions offers little support for the view that PAC money buys votes.
One study concludes PAC contributions do not affect members' voting patterns.
Another study emphasizes the relative inability of PACs to determine congressional voting.
Some dissenting voices exist.
Reassessing the Role of Money
The approach involves revisiting the question with a different theoretical account of the legislator-donor exchange.
Premise:
PACs are rational actors maximizing their influence on legislative outcomes.
Challenges the standard account of PAC rationality.
Does not predict a strong causal relationship between PAC money and floor votes.
House members and interest group representatives have an implicit cooperative agreement.
Constraints on member behavior and rational calculations limit votes as the currency of exchange.
Hypotheses
Effects of money are more apparent in committee decision making than on the floor.
Member participation, not votes, is the key variable.
Participation is a crucial but neglected element of congressional decision making.
Money buys members' time, mobilizing bias in congressional committee decision making.
Model and Implications
A model of committee participation is developed and estimated to test if moneyed interests mobilize bias.
Data from three House committees on three issues are analyzed.
Implications are discussed for:
Understanding of money
Interest groups
Representation in Congress.
The Rational PAC Revisited
Interdependencies of legislators and moneyed interests are widely discussed.
Legislators and interest groups depend on each other to promote their goals.
Legislators seek financial and political support; interest groups seek favorable legislative action.
Relationship is one of implicit exchange.
Contributions are marked in an invisible ledger and used for legislative ends.
Contributions and Roll Call Voting
Literature focuses on contributions and roll call voting.
Hypothesis: contributions influence legislative outcomes by purchasing votes or serving as investments.
Evidence of such effects appears infrequently, posing a puzzle for theorists.
PACs flourish despite low legislative efficacy; payoffs seem inadequate.
PAC Rationality
One explanation: PACs raise and disburse money with local congressional elections, not specific legislative ends, in mind.
Decentralized nature of PAC organizations inclines them to do this.
Using money solely to affect election outcomes is not likely to be rational.
The probability that any single group's contribution will affect a congressional election is slight.
Organizational arrangements may create some inefficiency, but systematic allocation patterns driven by legislative considerations are expected.
Contribution Strategies
One would expect contribution strategies to favor swing legislators in anticipated floor battles.
Money allocated to almost certain supporters (or opponents) should be seen as irrational.
Evidence suggests such "misallocations" systematically occur.
Business-Industry Political Action Committee (BIPAC) and the National Chamber of Commerce give overwhelmingly to conservative Republicans.
Labor PACs give overwhelmingly to incumbent Democrats loyal to labor's agenda.
Oil PACs give to conservative incumbents regardless of party and to friends regardless of ideology.
PACs reward their friends, even when not in danger of defeat.
Dairy PACs were less likely to contribute to swing legislators on dairy issues.
Moneyed interests spend a good deal of effort singing to the choir.
Access vs. Influence
Contributions buy "access" to members and their staffs.
If money buys access, what does access buy?
Access gives opportunities to directly lobby and persuade legislators.
The effect of the group on the vote should still appear in systematic analysis, but it does not.
The Rational PAC Revised
Existing literature suggests two puzzles:
Why allocate scarce resources where expected political benefits are so low?
Why contribute so heavily to strongest supporters and occasionally to strongest opponents?
Premise of rationality need not be rejected; theoretical work requires a more complete account of rational PAC behavior.
Interest group resources are intended to accomplish something different from influencing elections or buying votes.
PAC money should be allocated to mobilize legislative support and demobilize opposition.
Factors Influencing Legislators' Decisions
Factors that predispose a member to vote a certain way:
Party leaders
Ideology
Constituency
Position of the administration
Members' votes constrained by past voting histories.
Public, recorded nature of the vote may limit member's discretion.
Dichotomous nature of the vote acts as a constraint.
Limits on member responsiveness to messages wrapped in money are substantial, at least regarding floor voting.
Strategic PAC Resource Allocation
Rational PAC should expect little in the way of marginal benefits in votes bought for dollars spent.
Individual votes aren't easy to change, and utility depends on their net cumulative effect.
The expected marginal utility approximates zero in most cases.
Resources should be allocated elsewhere and to other purposes.
Well aware of the decentralized nature of congressional decision making, resources are allocated at the committee stage where efficiently spent.
Interest group preferences incorporated there have a strong chance of surviving, while provisions not in the committee vehicle are difficult to attach later.
Committee assignment process increases the probability of finding a sympathetic audience at the committee or subcommittee stage.
Members seek positions to promote interests that help them get reelected.
Committee Dynamics
Less public, often informal, nature of committee decision making suggests members' responsiveness to campaign donors will receive less scrutiny.
Clientelism flourishes at the committee stage.
Groups will strategically allocate their resources with knowledge that investments in the appropriate committee are likely to pay higher dividends.
In the House, a more targeted strategy is recommended.
The Goal of PACs
PACs hope to gain influence at the committee level.
Purchasing votes is one possibility, but PACs still tend to give to their strongest supporters.
Committee votes, like floor votes, are dichotomous decisions.
Constituency, ideology, party, and administration are also at work.
Little evidence that contributions influence voting in committee any more than on the floor.
Political money alters members' patterns of legislative involvement.
Buying Time
Object of a rational PAC allocation strategy is not simply the direction of legislators' preferences but the vigor with which those preferences are promoted in the decision making process.
Strategies involve inducing sympathetic members to get actively involved in activities that directly affect the shape of committee legislation.
Purposes of PACs in allocating selective benefits are analogous to the purposes that Arnold attributes to legislatively strategic bureaucrats.
The goal is not simply to purchase support but to provide incentives for supporters to act as agents.
Participation is Crucial
Participation is crucial to determining legislative outcomes, and voting is perhaps the least important of the various ways in which committee members participate.
While members' voting choices are highly constrained, how they allocate their time, staff, and political capital is much more discretionary.
Legislative resources are scarce, and their allocation to one activity results in other beneficial opportunities foregone.
Member's level of involvement is something a strategic PAC can expect to affect.
Contribution need not change a member's position in any material way; it need only command some increment of legislative resources.
Member will allocate scarce legislative resources on the group's behalf so long as the marginal utility of the contribution to the member exceeds the expected marginal utility of the most valuable remaining use of the member's resources.
Rationality of Contributing to Supporters and Opponents
It explains the ostensibly anomalous tendency of PACs to contribute so heavily to members who are almost certain to win reelection and almost certain to support the group's point of view.
More likely certain members are to support the group, the more active it should want them to be.
It makes sense of evidence that PACs sometimes contribute to members who will almost certainly oppose them and whose involvement in an issue stands to do the group harm.
The PAC may have no hope of changing the opponent's mind but may, at the margin at least, diminish the intensity with which the member pursues policies that the organization does not like.
The intent of the money, then, is not persuasion but demobilization.
We should not expect the demobilizing effect of money to be nearly so strong as the mobilizing effect.
The mobilization hypothesis is on stronger theoretical ground.
Access as a Goal
Access is an important, proximate goal of the interest group pursuing a legislative agenda.
Access refers to the reciprocal efforts of the group.
It is the pipeline through which the group effectively subsidizes the considerable time and information costs associated with their supporters' participation in the matters the group cares about.
Group representatives often serve as "service bureaus" or adjuncts to congressional staff.
They provide technical information and policy analysis, political intelligence, draft legislation and craft amendments, and even write speeches or talking points.
Such subsidies to the "congressman-as-enterprise" do not necessarily persuade, but they should affect the patterns of activity and abdication that have a direct bearing on legislative deliberations and outcomes.
Data
Data are drawn from staff interviews and markup records of three House committees on three issues:
Dairy Stabilization Act, Agriculture Committee in 1982
Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA), Education and Labor in 1982
Natural Gas Market Policy Act, Energy and Commerce during 1983-84
Features of the Cases
Highly significant pieces of legislation, the stakes of each measuring in the billions of dollars.
Natural Gas Market Policy Act: the deregulation of natural gas prices.
Job Training Partnership Act: annual spending expected in the four-to-five-billion-dollar range.
Dairy Stabilization Act: adjust the scheduled support price for milk downward.
Evidence of the influence of PAC money on congressional decision making can hardly be counted narrow or trivial.
Deliberations bore in significant ways on major interests, both public and private.
Salience Among Actors
All three were salient among actors other than the private groups immediately affected.
Natural Gas Market Policy Act: consumer interest in the issue of natural gas pricing was unusually high.
Gas heating costs had been climbing quickly despite a substantial surplus of domestic natural gas.
The Washington Post gave Commerce Committee deliberations front-page coverage.
The issue was a high priority for the Reagan administration.
The job training bill was one of the most important domestic initiatives of Reagan's first term and received considerable media attention.
The dairy bill was also salient among actors.
The burgeoning budget deficit loomed large on Capitol Hill.
The administration counted the price adjustments a high priority.
Previous Studies
Each of the policy areas has received the attention of previous scholars studying PAC contributions and floor roll calls.
In each case, the effects of PAC money were found to be slight.
Past research indicates that the selection of cases is biased against the argument.
High salience issues should exhibit little PAC influence on legislative behavior, yet each of the cases here commanded the attention of a wide range of political actors.
Past research suggests that we will find little PAC influence in precisely these three policy areas.
Hypotheses
Finding support for the hypothesis that money mobilizes support (or demobilizes opposition) at the committee level supports that:
The results of this exploration are apt to generalize to other committees and other issues.
The null results of past research are more likely to be artifacts of the legislative behavior and the legislative stage studied.
The Model - Participation
The model of participation is adapted from Hall 1987.
Members of Congress are purposive actors who allocate their time, staff, and other legislative resources in such a way as to advance certain personal goals or interests.
Goals are "evoked."
Any particular issue may evoke several goals simultaneously or may evoke none at all.
Promoting or protecting district interests.
Benefits and Costs
In deciding whether and to what extent to participate on a particular issue, the member estimates both the expected benefits and expected costs.
Benefits are a direct function of the issue's economic relevance to the districts.
Costs of participation are also important and highly variable.
Assignment to the subcommittee of jurisdiction provides members with greater formal opportunities to participate and access to an earlier stage of the sequential process.
Subcommittee leadership position subsidizes participation even more.
Freshman status tends to increase the information costs and diminish the opportunities or resources a member enjoys for any particular bill.
Campaign Contributions
The level of contributions each member receives from PACs interested in the issue at hand.
Effects of money on participation should not be simply linear.
The positive effect of contributions on participation should be contingent on probable support.
To the extent that contributions are given to probable opponents, on the other hand, they should diminish participation.
Contributions may well be related to other activities that moneyed interests employ to further their legislative aims, making it difficult to isolate the effects of any particular part of their effort.
Results capture the effect of the several resources that moneyed interests employ.
The Dependent Variable
The dependent variable is the participation of member i on bill j.
Participation refers to a member's activity both during formal committee markups and committee action behind the scenes.
Data on activity are drawn from:
Semistructured interviews with both the majority and minority staffers assigned to cover each bill
Largely unpublished but meticulously kept committee and subcommittee markup records.
Summary Measurement
Measure of participation that we use for the purposes of this exploration is a simple scale score derived from a factor analysis of six activities:
Attendance
Voting participation
Speaking
Offering amendments during committee markups
Role in authoring the legislative vehicle or an amendment in the nature of a substitute
Negotiating behind the scenes at either the member or the staff level.
Institutional Positions and Status
Measured with dichotomous variables that are set at zero except as the following conditions hold:
Subcommittee membership takes a value of one if a member sat on the subcommittee with jurisdiction over the bill.
Leadership position takes a value of one if a member was chair or ranking minority member of either the full or subcommittee.
Freshman status takes a value of one for members in their first term in the House.
District Relevance
Measuring the relevance of each issue to committee members' districts.
In the natural gas case:
Total district-level natural gas productions
The economic effect of gas price increases on residential consumers in the member's district.
District Conflict
Intradistrict conflict occurs as the production and inflation variables both approach their upper limits.
Measured as the product of two terms: "high production" and "high inflation."
When either district gas production or inflationary effect is below the committee mean, then intradistrict conflict is zero.
Measuring Interest
In the dairy stabilization case, district relevance is directly related to the importance of dairy farming, measured simply by the total number of dairy cows in the member's district.
For the Job Training Partnership Act, district relevance is directly related to the importance of federal jobs programs in addressing structural unemployment, which is measured as the current level of CETA expenditures in the member's district.
Estimate the effect of group expenditures on participation by including pairs of interactions between group contributions and indicators of probable support or opposition.
Dairy Stabilization
Measure probable support or opposition using the ratings of the National Farmers' Union (NFU).
Two separate interactions: money to supporters and money to opponents.
Money to supporters is the product of contributions and the member's distance from the mean NFU score where the members' rating is greater than the mean; the money-support term is zero otherwise.
Money to opponents is the product of contributions and the member's distance from the mean NFU score, where the member's rating is less than the mean; the money-opposition term is zero otherwise.
Expected effect on participation is positive for money to supporters and negative for money to opponents in each case.
Natural Gas
The main issues at stake pitted the major gas producers and intrastate pipelines against the interstate pipelines and distributors.
Distinguish the various energy PACs according to the principal business activities of their affiliates.
Classify each affiliate according to its principal interests in the natural gas area.
Divide the contributions a member received according to whether they came from producers or intrastate pipelines and interstates or distributors.
The measure of contributions that is employed, then, is the producer-intrastate contributions minus the interstate-distributor contributions.
Measuring Group Support
Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) scores were more appropriate as an indicator of likely support or opposition.
Money to supporters is the product of net producer-intrastate contributions and the member's distance from the mean ADA score where the member's rating is less than the mean; the money-support term is zero otherwise; and money to opponents is the product of contributions and the member's distance from the mean ADA score where the member's rating is greater than the mean; the money-opposition term is zero otherwise.
Job Training
Labor unions were one of the single largest categories of contributors to congressional campaigns.
Measuring Group Support
A net contributions variable, which takes the value of the member's total labor contributions less the total contributions received from national business organizations.
Money to supporters is the product of net labor contributions and the member's distance from the mean COPE score, where the member's rating is greater than the mean; and money to opponents is the product of contributions and the member's distance from the mean COPE score where the member's rating is less than the mean.
Results and Interpretations
Explicitly account for contributions effectively endogenous for allocating contributions to committee members during the previous election cycle, a group may attempt to anticipate who the principal players will be on issues it cares about.
Participation model is estimated using two-stage least squares, with the second stage results reported in the tables.
In each of the three cases, the model performs quite well, explaining over 55% of the variance in participation.
The analysis provides solid support for the principal hypothesis of this study, that moneyed interests mobilize bias in committee decision making.
Dairy Stabilization
Dairy industry PACs gave to their likely supporters significantly increased their participation.
The mobilization coefficient remains positive and significant in the face of the multivariate controls reinforcing the interpretation that the connection between group resources and mobilization is causal.
When dairy PACs did give to their probable opponents, moreover, there is some evidence that the contributions diminished participation.
The negative sign is consistent with the demobilization hypothesis.
Effect of money on decision making in the House Agriculture Committee was to encourage industry supporters to be active and, if anything, to encourage industry opponents to abdicate.
Job Training Partnership
Contributions that labor groups made to their supporters had a substantial, statistically significant effect on participation during Education and Labor deliberations.
In each case, a change in the money support variable from its minimum to its maximum value moves a member approximately one-fourth of the way along the participation scale, almost exactly one standard deviation.
In both cases, the coefficient is greater than that for subcommittee membership, a variable generally considered central to understanding participation in the postreform House.
Education and Labor bill provides some support for the demobilization hypothesis.
Natural Gas
The results regarding moneyed interests and mobilization are only slightly less compelling in the natural gas case, a case complicated both by divisions within the industry and the apparent importance of both organized and unorganized interests.
Still, the mobilization hypothesis finds strong support in the behavior of Energy and Commerce members.
The mobilization hypothesis is confirmed in all three.
Institutional Position
For the most part, the other variables in the model also perform as predicted and suggest interesting implications for the politics of representation in a decentralized Congress.
The relevance of an issue to the member's district enhances member participation in two cases, providing evidence that Agriculture and Commerce members purposively allocate their legislative time and resources to promote the interests of their constituencies.
Indeed, a change in gas production from its minimum to its maximum corresponds to a 32% change along the participation scale, the difference between simply showing up and being a major player on the bill.
Diffuse Interests
The preferences of unorganized interests sometimes constrain the responsiveness of members to organized groups.
Producer interests and high consumer-voter salience is rare.
No such constraint on the behavioral effect of producer contributions.
One might expected contribute to the mobilization effect diminished by a member of high inflation.
Most of the variables that tap members' institutional positions proves to be strong determinants of committee participation.
Conclusion
House members and interest group representatives are parties to an implicit cooperative agreement, but the constraints on member behavior and the rational calculations of group strategists limit the extent to which votes become the basis for exchange.
This should find little causal connection between contributions and votes, especially on the floor.
You find expect to find an important connection between contributions and the legislative involvement of sympathetic members, especially in committee relationship that empirical research date has altogether ignored.
Support of Hypothesis
Demonstrated the participation of House members on three issues in three committees to find solid support or principles hypothesis moneyed interests are able to mobilize legislators already predisposed to support the group's position.
Conversely, money That a group contributes to its lightly opponents has either a negligible or negative effect on their participation.It does by the marginal time energy, and legislative resources Committee participation Requires.
It apparently did buy the marginal time, energy, and legislative resources that committee participation requires.
Implications
The argument presented here provides a very different slant on the role of interest groups as purveyors of information in the deliberations of representative assemblies.
Information-gathering it; analyzing it; turning it into speeches, amendments, and bills; using it to develop legislative strategy-can be very costly.
Such costs, more than anything, limit the extent to which a nominal member will be a meaningful player in the decision-making process on a particular bill.
Money-induced activity will distort the "representativeness of deliberations."
Information costs affect the intensity with which their positions are promoted by their legislative agents.
The resources of moneyed interests at least partly determine the weights.
One interesting finding is that money