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

Abstract

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Perceptions of Corruption, Political Distrust, and the Weakening of Climate Policy

“…This entails government responsiveness not exclusively to the narrow strategic interests of carbon-intensive industries but also to broader public interests and international commitments. Institutional corruption may take the form of money in politics, which in certain countries has systemically and unduly influenced policy priorities and even election outcomes (Bekkouche and Cagé 2018;Ferguson 1995;Ferguson et al 2018;Lessig 2011;Winters and Page 2009). The striking, well-supported findings of Gilens and Page (2014) regarding the inordinately elite-driven and oligarchic nature of policy making in the US Congress, for example, suggest something contrary to beneficent lobbying.…”

A Theory of Small Campaign Contributions

“…We summarize this through a contest success function. 9 This captures the idea that these funds are used to …nance activities such as get-out-the-vote e¤orts (see Enos and Fowler, 2016) or advertising (as for example in Baron, 1994, Prat, 2002, Coate 2004a,b, and Morton and Myerson, 2012), which may increase a candidate's vote totals.…”

“…Small donors simultaneously and non-cooperatively select which amount    to contribute to their preferred candidate, with 10 Each small donor  has a twodimensional type ¬      , where   2 f g identi…es who is his preferred candidate/party and   represents 's income (which will in ‡uence his willingness to contribute.) There are   donors of type  , distributed in income classes  1      according to some (dis- 9 This is inspired by an increasingly large literature: see Tullock (1980), Hirshleifer (1989), Baron (1994), Skaperdas and Grofman (1995), Esteban and Ray (2001), Epstein and Nitzan (2006), Konrad (2007), Jia et al (2013), Herrera et al (2014Herrera et al ( , 2016, among others.…”

A Theory of Small Campaign Contributions

“…10 Each small donor  has a twodimensional type ¬      , where   2 f g identi…es who is his preferred candidate/party and   represents 's income (which will in ‡uence his willingness to contribute.) There are   donors of type  , distributed in income classes  1      according to some (dis- 9 This is inspired by an increasingly large literature: see Tullock (1980), Hirshleifer (1989), Baron (1994) 1 0 A similar setup with many individual players investing resources to collectively …ght over an issue has been pioneered by Katz et al (1990) for rent-seeking, and by Ray (1999, 2001) for con ‡ict situations.…”