How Money Drives US Congressional Elections

Abstract

This paper analyzes whether money influences election outcomes. Using a new and more comprehensive dataset built from government sources, the paper begins by showing that the relations between money and major party votes in all elections for the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives from 1980 to 2014 are well approximated by straight lines. It then considers

19 Things We Learned from the 2016 Election

“…They had things wired, no matter which way the election went. The work of Ferguson, Jorgensen, and Chen (2016) gives some insight into the links between party positions and their sources of funds that are necessary to compete in modern elections.…”

The Price of a Vote: Evidence from France, 1993-2014

“…Spatial and temporal correlation Using spatial and time data requires paying careful attention to the possible correlations between observations that give rise to heteroscedasticity, which can bias the estimates of standard error coe cients. Electoral data, by their nature, are subject to such pitfalls since electoral districts are geographically defined, as demonstrated by Ferguson et al (2016). If serial correlation is well known and often corrected for, it is not the case for spatial correlation, which creates the same type of bias.…”

“…On the other hand, others claim that the marginal e↵ects of incumbent and challenger spending are roughly equal (Green and Krasno, 1988;Gerber, 1998;Foucault and François, 2005). Finally, according to Levitt (1994), money does not influence election outcomes, while Ferguson et al (2016) find the relations between money and major party votes are well approximated by straight lines.…”

High finance, political money and the US Congress: a quantitative assessment of the campaign to roll back Dodd–Frank

“…No less importantly, state of the art techniques for estimating unobserved variables do not produce results consistent with strong claims for popularity. They produce, in fact, the reverse: It appears that the millions of Americans who think they live in a money-driven political system are right (Ferguson, Jorgensen, and Chen, 2016, but especially 2020) (Jorgensen, Jones, and Song 2018).…”

“…The US has now run this experiment in real time; is there anyone who thinks that the 2016 election was improved over that of 2012? See our discussion in (Ferguson, Jorgensen, and Chen 2016). 36 For the voting, see https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/114-2015/h28 Note that the exact numbers of representatives voting on these bills varied slightly.…”