Campaign Contributions and Roll-Call Voting in the U.S. House of Representatives: The Case of the Sugar Industry

Abstract

The question of whether campaign contributions buy roll-call votes is both important and contentious. Although researchers often find positive correlations between the two, it is difficult to conclude that these correlations are causal because interest groups may be simply giving to their supporters rather than attempting to change members’ voting behavior. In this paper we use a pair of votes on antisugar subsidy amendments to investigate the causal effects of contributions on voting. With multiple votes we can control for the supportiveness of the district or member by using fixed effects. We find strong evidence that changing contribution patterns caused significant changes in the probability that a district or member would vote to support the sugar industry (i.e., against the amendments). Our results hold in both district and incumbent fixed effects models and also when we redefine the time window for measuring relevant contributions.

Either with Us or Against Us: Business Power and Campaign Contributions in an Age of Hyper-Partisanship

“…This design greatly improves the precision and generalizability of the outcome variable compared to many previous studies. A standard technique for measuring the effect of campaign contributions on roll call votes has been to regress votes on aggregated contributions from an industry or the entire business community and only sample bills on which the industry or business community exhibit unity (Davis 1993;Fellowes and Wolf 2004;Grier, Grier, and Mkrtchian 2022;Moore, Powell, and Reeves 2013;Wawro 2001). However, this technique suffers from several problems.…”

PACs and January 6th: Campaign finance and objections to the Electoral College vote count

“…The different level of importance each of these categories of campaign donors assign to the stability of democratic institutions should be reflected in legislator behavior. While there is no consistent pattern of PAC donations affecting votes on all legislation, several studies document individual cases of corporate PACs having increased influence on votes ranging from bank bailouts (Mian et al, 2010), to financial regulations (Stratmann, 2002), or sugar industry supports (Grier et al, 2022). Similarly, there is evidence that the preferences of individual donors exert influence on actions of legislators.…”