IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/13945.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Bribery or Just Desserts? Evidence on the Influence of Congressional Voting Patterns on PAC Contributions from Exogenous Variation in the Sex Mix of Legislator Offspring

Author

Listed:
  • Dalton Conley
  • Brian J. McCabe

Abstract

Evidence on the relationship between political contributions and legislators' voting behavior is marred by concerns about endogeneity in the estimation process. Using a legislator's offspring sex mix as an exogenous variable, we employ a two-stage least squares estimation procedure to predict the effect of voting behavior on political contributions. Following previous research, we find that a legislator's proportion daughters has a significant effect on voting behavior for women's issues, as measured by score in the "Congressional Record on Choice" issued by NARAL Pro-Choice America. In the second stage, we make a unique contribution by demonstrating a significant impact of exogenous voting behavior on PAC contributions, lending credibility to the hypothesis that Political Action Committees respond to legislators' voting patterns by "rewarding" political candidates that vote in line with the positions of the PAC, rather than affecting or "bribing" those same votes -- at least in this high profile policy domain.

Suggested Citation

  • Dalton Conley & Brian J. McCabe, 2008. "Bribery or Just Desserts? Evidence on the Influence of Congressional Voting Patterns on PAC Contributions from Exogenous Variation in the Sex Mix of Legislator Offspring," NBER Working Papers 13945, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:13945
    Note: PE POL
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w13945.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. James J. Heckman & Thomas E. MaCurdy, 1985. "A Simultaneous Equations Linear Probability Model," Canadian Journal of Economics, Canadian Economics Association, vol. 18(1), pages 28-37, February.
    2. Grier, Kevin B & Munger, Michael C, 1991. "Committee Assignments, Constituent Preferences, and Campaign Contributions," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 29(1), pages 24-43, January.
    3. Dahl, Gordon B. & Moretti, Enrico, 2004. "The Demand for Sons: Evidence from Divorce, Fertility, and Shotgun Marriage," Department of Economics, Working Paper Series qt63f8483b, Department of Economics, Institute for Business and Economic Research, UC Berkeley.
    4. Angrist, Joshua D & Evans, William N, 1998. "Children and Their Parents' Labor Supply: Evidence from Exogenous Variation in Family Size," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 88(3), pages 450-477, June.
    5. Bronars, Stephen G & Lott, John R, Jr, 1997. "Do Campaign Donations Alter How a Politician Votes? Or, Do Donors Support Candidates Who Value the Same Things That They Do?," Journal of Law and Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 40(2), pages 317-350, October.
    6. Gordon B. Dahl & Enrico Moretti, 2008. "The Demand for Sons," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 75(4), pages 1085-1120.
    7. Dalton Conley & Rebecca Glauber, 2006. "Parental Educational Investment and Children’s Academic Risk: Estimates of the Impact of Sibship Size and Birth Order from Exogenous Variation in Fertility," Journal of Human Resources, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 41(4).
    8. Kroszner, Randall S. & Stratmann, Thomas, 1999. "Does Political Ambiguity Pay? Corporate Campaign contributions and the Rewards to Legislator Reputation," Working Papers 155, The University of Chicago Booth School of Business, George J. Stigler Center for the Study of the Economy and the State.
    9. Borck, Rainald, 1996. "Ideology and Interest Groups," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 88(1-2), pages 147-160, July.
    10. Chappell, Henry W, Jr, 1982. "Campaign Contributions and Congressional Voting: A Simultaneous Probit-Tobit Model," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 64(1), pages 77-83, February.
    11. Stratmann, Thomas, 1996. "How Reelection Constituencies Matter: Evidence from Political Action Committees' Contributions and Congressional Voting," Journal of Law and Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 39(2), pages 603-635, 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. Fagan, Frank & Bilgel, Fırat, 2015. "Sunsets and federal lawmaking: Evidence from the 110th Congress," International Review of Law and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 41(C), pages 1-6.

    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. Stratmann, Thomas, 1998. "The Market for Congressional Votes: Is Timing of Contributions Everything?," Journal of Law and Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 41(1), pages 85-113, April.
    2. Kigon Nam, 2010. "The Effect of Having More Children on Women's Labour Force Participation in Korea: An Analysis Using Instrument Variables," LABOUR, CEIS, vol. 24(3), pages 333-356, September.
    3. Stratmann, Thomas, 2002. "Can Special Interests Buy Congressional Votes? Evidence from Financial Services Legislation," Journal of Law and Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 45(2), pages 345-373, October.
    4. Dalton Conley & Rebecca Glauber, 2005. "Parental Educational Investment and Children's Academic Risk: Estimates of the Impact of Sibship Size and Birth Order from Exogenous Variations in Fertility," NBER Working Papers 11302, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    5. Åslund, Olof & Grönqvist, Hans, 2010. "Family size and child outcomes: Is there really no trade-off?," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 17(1), pages 130-139, January.
    6. Emla Fitzsimons & Bansi Malde, 2014. "Empirically probing the quantity–quality model," Journal of Population Economics, Springer;European Society for Population Economics, vol. 27(1), pages 33-68, January.
    7. Morten Bennedsen & Kasper Nielsen & Francisco Pérez-González & Daniel Wolfenzon, 2005. "Inside the Family Firm: The Role of Families in Succession Decisions and Performance," CIE Discussion Papers 2005-13, University of Copenhagen. Department of Economics. Centre for Industrial Economics, revised Sep 2005.
    8. Sandra E. Black & Paul J. Devereux & Kjell G. Salvanes, 2010. "Small Family, Smart Family? Family Size and the IQ Scores of Young Men," Journal of Human Resources, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 45(1).
    9. Ansolabehere, Stephen & De Figueiredo, John M. & Snyder, James M., 2003. "Are Campaign Contributions Investment in the Political Marketplace or Individual Consumption? Or "Why Is There So Little Money in Politics?"," Working papers 4272-02, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Sloan School of Management.
    10. Kroszner, Randall S & Stratmann, Thomas, 2005. "Corporate Campaign Contributions, Repeat Giving, and the Rewards to Legislator Reputation," Journal of Law and Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 48(1), pages 41-71, April.
    11. Stephen Ansolabehere & John M. de Figueiredo & James M. Snyder Jr, 2003. "Why is There so Little Money in U.S. Politics?," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 17(1), pages 105-130, Winter.
    12. Thomas Carr & Toru Kitagawa, 2021. "Testing Instrument Validity with Covariates," Papers 2112.08092, arXiv.org, revised Sep 2023.
    13. Damian Clarke, 2018. "Children And Their Parents: A Review Of Fertility And Causality," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 32(2), pages 518-540, April.
    14. Bonsang, Eric & Pronkina, Elizaveta, 2023. "Family size and vaccination among older individuals: The case of COVID-19 vaccine," Economics & Human Biology, Elsevier, vol. 50(C).
    15. Peter, Noemi & Lundborg, Petter & Webbink, Dinand, 2015. "The Effect of a Sibling's Gender on Earnings, Education and Family Formation," IZA Discussion Papers 9128, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    16. Thomas Stratmann, 2005. "Some talk: Money in politics. A (partial) review of the literature," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 124(1), pages 135-156, July.
    17. Joseph P. McGarrity & Armand Picou, 2001. "Do Several Winning Coalitions Exist in a State for Senators of the Same Party? Evidence from an Event Study," Southern Economic Journal, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 68(2), pages 281-309, October.
    18. Ahrens, Jan-Philipp & Landmann, Andreas & Woywode, Michael, 2015. "Gender preferences in the CEO successions of family firms: Family characteristics and human capital of the successor," Journal of Family Business Strategy, Elsevier, vol. 6(2), pages 86-103.
    19. Bhalotra, Sonia & Clarke, Damian & Mühlrad, Hanna & Palme, Mårten, 2021. "Health and Labor Market Impacts of Twin Birth : Evidence from a Swedish IVF Policy Mandate," The Warwick Economics Research Paper Series (TWERPS) 1391, University of Warwick, Department of Economics.
    20. Lídia Farré, 2013. "The Role of Men in the Economic and Social Development of Women: Implications for Gender Equality," The World Bank Research Observer, World Bank, vol. 28(1), pages 22-51, February.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • H11 - Public Economics - - Structure and Scope of Government - - - Structure and Scope of Government
    • J18 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Public Policy
    • K0 - Law and Economics - - General

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    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:nbr:nberwo:13945. 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: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    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.