Political and Economic Factors Affecting Agricultural PAC Contribution Strategies

Abstract

Public choice describes a marketplace for political favors that could explain strong support for agriculture. While many researchers have studied political markets, few have examined agriculture. This study addresses contributions from twenty-six PAC aggregates to senators in the 103rd Congress. Using a tobit model, legislative attributes, such as tenure, committee membership, and ideology, were regressed on contributions. Overall, the agricultural industry targeted nonsenior, conservative Democrats from agriculturally dependent states in close election races and who served either on the agriculture committee or the agriculture appropriations committee. However, many differences were found across subsectors within agriculture, such as crops and livestock. Copyright 1999, Oxford University Press.

Net campaign contributions, agricultural interests, and votes on liberalizing trade with China

“…legislators and less emphasis on giving to incumbents. Van Doren et al (1999) report a similar finding.…”

“…He voted 'no.' 11 Studies of the strategies used in allocating contributions include Groseclose and Snyder (1996), Van Doren et al (1999), and Fisher et al (2005). Studies on the information component include Lohmann (1995) and Laffont (1999).…”

“…The latter has been addressed by Gokcekus and Fisher (2009) in the context of cotton. See also Young et al (1990), Stratmann (1992) and Van Doren et al (1999). These studies consider only a single interest group, however, whereas we use a simultaneous equation approach.…”

Are Agricultural PACs Monolithic? An Empirical Investigation of Political Contributions from Agricultural Subsectors

“…There is a wealth of literature suggesting that politicians provide political favors to parties that offer them financial contributions (Tripathi, Ansolabehere, and Snyder 2002; Becker 1983). Political Action Committees (PACs), for example, enable people to concentrate donations to further a common interest (van Doren, Hoag, and Field 1999; Taylor 2003). To the unfamiliar, “agriculture” might seem to be a group with common interests.…”

“…However, the analysis does illustrate differences in the structural equations that explain donations for several subsectors of agriculture in both the House and Senate, thus suggesting differences in contribution strategies. This information, plus our ability to compare to the earlier van Doren, Hoag, and Field (1999) study when the Senate was controlled by Democrats instead of Republicans, allows us to determine the degree of homogeneity of agricultural PAC donation strategies, and to offer some thoughts about what their behavior implies about how monolithic their objectives might be. We hope that this initial analysis might provide some useful insight for future research into the ability of group cooperation to produce or reduce rents for both the participants and society (Pasour and Rucker 2005).…”