IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/soceco/v37y2008i6p2443-2453.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Constituents' economic interests and senator support for spending limitations

Author

Listed:
  • Dennis, Christopher
  • Medoff, Marshall H.
  • Magnera, Michael

Abstract

Peltzman [Peltzman, S., 1984. Constituent interest and congressional voting. Journal of Law and Economics 27, 181-210] argues that if constituents' economic interests have well-defined "winners and losers" and are appropriately measured, then constituents' economic interests, and not legislator ideology, are the most important determinates of legislator voting. We test Peltzman's theory by examining senatorial voting on three mandated spending limitation bills. We find, consistent with Peltzman's theory, that the ratio of federal spending in a senator's state to federal taxes paid by that state, and not a senator's personal ideology, matters on legislation where there are well-defined economic "winners and losers." This is particularly important because unlike other constituents' economic interest measures that only impact a fraction of the constituency, the ratio of federal spending to federal taxes in a state represents the economic interests of all the constituents in a state.

Suggested Citation

  • Dennis, Christopher & Medoff, Marshall H. & Magnera, Michael, 2008. "Constituents' economic interests and senator support for spending limitations," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 37(6), pages 2443-2453, December.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:soceco:v:37:y:2008:i:6:p:2443-2453
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6W5H-4SJP7F2-2/2/2254056f7f5d14ab653a88fd781d2fee
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Carson, Jamie L. & Crespin, Michael H. & Jenkins, Jeffery A. & Wielen, Ryan J. Vander, 2004. "Shirking in the Contemporary Congress: A Reappraisal," Political Analysis, Cambridge University Press, vol. 12(2), pages 176-179, April.
    2. Copeland, Cassandra & Laband, David N, 2002. "Expressiveness and Voting," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 110(3-4), pages 351-363, March.
    3. Canes-Wrone, Brandice & Brady, David W. & Cogan, John F., 2002. "Out of Step, Out of Office: Electoral Accountability and House Members' Voting," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 96(1), pages 127-140, March.
    4. Richardson, Lilliard E, Jr & Munger, Michael C, 1990. "Shirking, Representation, and Congressional Behavior: Voting on the 1983 Amendments to the Social Security Act," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 67(1), pages 11-33, October.
    5. Herron, Michael C., 2001. "Interest Group Ratings and Regression Inconsistency," Political Analysis, Cambridge University Press, vol. 9(3), pages 260-274, January.
    6. Kau, James B & Rubin, Paul H, 1993. "Ideology, Voting, and Shirking," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 76(1-2), pages 151-172, June.
    7. Kan, Kamhon & Yang, C C, 2001. "On Expressive Voting: Evidence from the 1988 U.S. Presidential Election," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 108(3-4), pages 295-312, September.
    8. Kalt, Joseph P & Zupan, Mark A, 1990. "The Apparent Ideological Behavior of Legislators: Testing for Principal-Agent Slack in Political Institutions," Journal of Law and Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 33(1), pages 103-131, April.
    9. Peltzman, Sam, 1984. "Constituent Interest and Congressional Voting," Journal of Law and Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 27(1), pages 181-210, April.
    10. Anthony Downs, 1957. "An Economic Theory of Political Action in a Democracy," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 65(2), pages 135-135.
    11. Herron, Michael C., 2004. "Studying Dynamics in Legislator Ideal Points: Scale Matters," Political Analysis, Cambridge University Press, vol. 12(2), pages 182-190, April.
    12. Jody W. Lipford & William R. Dougan, 1995. "A Public Choice-Theoretic Test of Ricardian Equivalence," Public Finance Review, , vol. 23(4), pages 467-483, October.
    13. Nelson, Douglas & Silberberg, Eugene, 1987. "Ideology and Legislator Shirking," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 25(1), pages 15-25, January.
    14. Douglas Hibbs, 2000. "Bread and Peace Voting in U.S. Presidential Elections," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 104(1), pages 149-180, July.
    15. McArthur, John & Marks, Stephen V, 1988. "Constitutent Interest vs. Legislator Ideology: The Role of Political Opportunity Cost," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 26(3), pages 461-470, July.
    16. Kalt, Joseph P & Zupan, Mark A, 1984. "Capture and Ideology in the Economic Theory of Politics," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 74(3), pages 279-300, June.
    17. Lott, John R, Jr & Davis, Michael L, 1992. "A Critical Review and an Extension of the Political Shirking Literature," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 74(4), pages 461-484, December.
    18. Kau, James B & Rubin, Paul H, 1979. "Self-Interest, Ideology, and Logrolling in Congressional Voting," Journal of Law and Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 22(2), pages 365-384, October.
    19. Dougan, William R & Munger, Michael C, 1989. "The Rationality of Ideology," Journal of Law and Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 32(1), pages 119-142, April.
    20. John Ashworth & Benny Geys & Bruno Heyndels, 2006. "Everyone likes a winner: An empirical test of the effect of electoral closeness on turnout in a context of expressive voting," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 128(3), pages 383-405, September.
    21. James R. Vanbeek, 1991. "Does the Decision to Retire Increase the Amount of Political Shirking?," Public Finance Review, , vol. 19(4), pages 444-456, October.
    22. Carter, John R & Guerette, Stephen D, 1992. "An Experimental Study of Expressive Voting," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 73(3), pages 251-260, April.
    23. McCarty, Nolan & Poole, Keith T. & Rosenthal, Howard, 2001. "The Hunt for Party Discipline in Congress," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 95(3), pages 673-687, September.
    24. Goff, Brian L & Grier, Kevin B, 1993. "On the (Mis)measurement of Legislator Ideology and Shirking," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 76(1-2), pages 5-20, June.
    25. Gerber, Elisabeth R & Morton, Rebecca B, 1998. "Primary Election Systems and Representation," The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, Oxford University Press, vol. 14(2), pages 304-324, October.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Andrew Chupp, B., 2011. "Environmental Constituent Interest, Green Electricity Policies, and Legislative Voting," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 62(2), pages 254-266, September.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Potters, Jan & Sloof, Randolph, 1996. "Interest groups: A survey of empirical models that try to assess their influence," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 12(3), pages 403-442, November.
    2. Dennis, Christopher & Bishin, Benjamin & Nicolaou, Politimy, 2000. "Constituent diversity and congress: the case of NAFTA," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 29(4), pages 349-360, July.
    3. John Lott & W. Reed, 1989. "Shirking and sorting in a political market with finite-lived politicians," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 61(1), pages 75-96, April.
    4. Franklin G. Mixon & Rand W. Ressler & M. Troy Gibson, 2003. "Congressional Memberships as Political Advertising: Evidence from the U.S. Senate," Southern Economic Journal, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 70(2), pages 414-424, October.
    5. René Lindstädt & Ryan Wielen, 2011. "Timely shirking: time-dependent monitoring and its effects on legislative behavior in the U.S. Senate," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 148(1), pages 119-148, July.
    6. Morong, Cyril, 1996. "Socio-economic elements in Public Choice research," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 25(5), pages 559-569.
    7. Atif Mian & Amir Sufi & Francesco Trebbi, 2010. "The Political Economy of the US Mortgage Default Crisis," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 100(5), pages 1967-1998, December.
    8. B. Chupp, 2014. "Political interaction in the senate: estimating a political “spatial” weights matrix and an application to lobbying behavior," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 160(3), pages 521-538, September.
    9. Stadelmann, David & Portmann, Marco & Eichenberger, Reiner, 2013. "Quantifying parliamentary representation of constituents’ preferences with quasi-experimental data," Journal of Comparative Economics, Elsevier, vol. 41(1), pages 170-180.
    10. Robert Lowry, 1998. "Religion and the demand for membership in environmental citizen groups," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 94(3), pages 223-240, March.
    11. Rausser, Gordon C. & de Gorter, Harry, 1988. "Endogenizing Policy In Models Of Agricultural Markets," 1988 Annual Meeting, August 1-3, Knoxville, Tennessee 270460, American Agricultural Economics Association (New Name 2008: Agricultural and Applied Economics Association).
    12. François Facchini & Louis Jaeck, 2019. "Ideology and the rationality of non-voting," Rationality and Society, , vol. 31(3), pages 265-286, August.
    13. Gertrud Fremling & John Lott, 1988. "Televising legislatures: Some thoughts on whether politicians are search goods," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 58(1), pages 73-78, July.
    14. P. Hägg, 1997. "Theories on the Economics of Regulation: A Survey of the Literature from a European Perspective," European Journal of Law and Economics, Springer, vol. 4(4), pages 337-370, December.
    15. Brandon Marshall & Michael Peress, 2018. "Dynamic estimation of ideal points for the US Congress," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 176(1), pages 153-174, July.
    16. Tanger, Shaun M. & Laband, David N., 2009. "An empirical analysis of bill co-sponsorship in the U.S. Senate: The Tree Act of 2007," Forest Policy and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 11(4), pages 260-265, July.
    17. Reed, W Robert & Schansberg, D. Eric & Wilbanks, James & Zhu, Zhen, 1998. "The Relationship between Congressional Spending and Tenure with an Application to Term Limits," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 94(1-2), pages 85-104, January.
    18. Hamlin, Alan & Jennings, Colin, 2011. "Expressive Political Behaviour: Foundations, Scope and Implications," British Journal of Political Science, Cambridge University Press, vol. 41(3), pages 645-670, July.
    19. Andrew Chupp, B., 2011. "Environmental Constituent Interest, Green Electricity Policies, and Legislative Voting," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 62(2), pages 254-266, September.
    20. Roberto Brunetti & Matthieu Pourieux, 2023. "Representative Policy-Makers? A Behavioral Experiment with French Politicians," Working Papers 2319, Groupe d'Analyse et de Théorie Economique Lyon St-Étienne (GATE Lyon St-Étienne), Université de Lyon.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:soceco:v:37:y:2008:i:6:p:2443-2453. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/inca/620175 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.