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Time to Give: PAC Motivations and Electoral Timing McCarty, Nolan Rothenberg, Lawrence S. Uploaded 07-09-1998 Keywords Interest Groups Campaign Finance Tobit GHK Simulation Abstract There has been much discussion about how members of Congress desire money early in the campaign season. However, to date, models of how contributions are allocated during the electoral cycle have been lacking. Our analysis attempts to remedy this gap by providing and testing a model which specifies how the process by which bargaining between members of Congress and organized interests produces the pattern of donations observed over the course of the electoral cycle. The results suggest that strategic incumbents can receive money early in the campaign if they desire but that they are generally unwilling to pay the price of lower aggregate fundraising and greater provision of access. These findings, in turn, buttress earlier empirical findings that question the instrumental value of early money; in particular, they imply that challengers have reasonably rational and informed expectations about how much money members of Congress are capable of raising over the electoral cycle and that the value of stockpiling money early is not sufficiently high to induce reelection-seeking incumbents to lower their access price significan

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A Dynamic Panel Analysis of Campaign Contributions in Elections for the U.S. House of Representatives Himmelberg, Charles P. Wawro, Gregory Uploaded 07-17-1998 Keywords campaign finance panel data methods dynamics GMM estimators censoring Abstract Political scientists have recognized the importance of dynamics in understanding the role of campaign finance in congressional elections. Yet for the most part, researchers have not exploited available data to its fullest or used appropriate methods to answer questions of interest. Though the Federal Election Commission's reporting and disclosure requirements enable us to use panel data models, researchers have ignored these powerful tools. One of the main advantages of panel data methods is that they enable us to account for unobserved individual and temporal effects that, if not accounted for, might lead us to incorrect inferences. In this paper we describe the problems with estimating dynamic panel models and discuss techniques that correct for these problems. We apply recently developed panel data methods to estimate a dynamic model of campaign finance and assess the usefulness of these methods by examining the robustness of results obtained with more traditional methods. We examine the relationship between past and current campaign contributions to incumbents and challengers during the 1986 through 1992 election cycles. Dynamic panel estimators give results that differ in substantively interesting ways from those given by standard estimators. In particular, the estimates obtained from dynamic panel methods suggest that challengers who are successful fundraisers can cut into the fundraising efforts of incumbents.

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Congressional Campaign Contributions, District Service and Electoral Outcomes in the United States: Statistical Tests of a Formal Game Model with Nonlinear Dynamics Mebane, Walter R. Uploaded 07-22-1997 Keywords congressional elections campaign contributions campaign finance district service intergovernmental transfers formal model game theory Cournot-Nash equilibrium Nash equilibrium differential equations dynamical system nonlinear dynamics Hopf bifurcation normal form Whitney embedding theorem divergence theorem Liouville's theorem multivariate normal distribution maximum likelihood Wald test stability asymptotic stability Abstract Using a two-stage game model of congressional campaigns, the second stage being a system of ordinary differential equations, I argue that candidates, political parties and financial contributors interact strategically in American congressional elections in a way that is inherently nonlinear. Congressional races in which the incumbent faces a challenge are generated by dynamical systems that have Hopf bifurcations: a small change in the challenger's quality or in the type of district service can change a stable incumbent advantage into an oscillating race in which the incumbent's chances are uncertain. The normal form equations for such a system inspire a statistical model that can recover qualitative features of the dynamics from cross-sectional data. I estimate and test the model using data from the 1984 and 1986 election periods for political action committee campaign contributions, intergovernmental transfers and general election vote shares.

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Legislative Entrepreneurship and Campaign Finance Wawro, Gregory Uploaded 07-21-1997 Keywords campaign finance fixed effects panel data selection bias Abstract Drawing on models of service--induced and investor PAC campaign contributions, I analyze the role that legislative entrepreneurship plays in PACs' contribution decisions. I explore the possibility that PACs use campaign contributions to invest in members of Congress with the expectation that members will reciprocate by engaging in entrepreneurial behavior to the benefit of PACs. To determine whether a relationship exists between legislative entrepreneurship and PAC contributions I compute measures of entrepreneurial behavior for individual members of the U.S. House using detailed data on bill sponsorship and congressional hearings from the 97th through the 101st Congress. In order to cleanly estimate the effects of legislative entrepreneurship, we need to account for unobservable member--specific factors that enter into the PAC contribution calculus. To account for such factors I employ panel data methods which require very few assumptions about the data and provide a way to test whether the manipulations of the data that are required for a panel analysis introduce bias.

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What to Do (and Not Do) With Dynamic Panel Data in Political Science (with apologies to Beck and Katz) Wawro, Gregory Uploaded 07-16-2000 Keywords dynamic panel data models lagged endogenous variables GMM estimators party identification campaign finance Abstract Panel data is a very valuable resource for finding empirical solutions to political science puzzles. Yet numerous published studies in political science that use panel data to estimate models with dynamics have failed to take into account important estimation issues which call into question the inferences we can make from these analyses. Simply put, the failure to account explicitly for unobserved individual effects in panel data leads to inconsistent estimates of parameters of interest. The fundamental requirement for consistency of parameter estimates---that the explanatory variables in a regression equation must be uncorrleated with the disturbance term---is not met unless individual specific effects are adequately accounted for. Dynamic panel data estimators that eliminate this problem have become fairly standard in the economics literature. The purpose of this paper is to introduce these methods to political scientists. First, I show how the problem of inconsistency arises in dynamic panel data. I then show how to correct for this problem using generalized method of moments (GMM) estimators. I then demonstrate the usefulness of these methods with replications of published analyses.

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Learning in Campaigns: A Policy Moderating Model of Individual Contributions to House Candidates Wand, Jonathan Mebane, Walter R. Uploaded 04-18-1999 Keywords FEC campaign contributions campaign finance policy moderation GLM generalized linear model negative binomial time series bootstrap U.S. House of Representatives 1984 election Abstract We propose a policy moderating model of individual campaign contributions to House campaigns. Based on a model that implies moderating behavior by voters, we hypothesize that individuals use expectations about the Presidential election outcome when deciding whether to donate money to a House candidate. Using daily campaign contributions data drawn from the FEC Itemized Contributions files for 1984, we estimate a generalized linear model for count data with serially correlated errors. We expand on previous empirical applications of this type of model by comparing standard errors derived from a sandwich estimator to confidence intervals produced by a nonparametric bootstrap.

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Poisson-Normal Dynamic Generalized Linear Mixed Models of U.S. House Campaign Contributions Mebane, Walter R. Wand, Jonathan Uploaded 07-11-1999 Keywords GLMM MCEM count model heterogeneity FEC campaign contributions campaign finance U.S. House of Representatives 1984 election Abstract We develop generalized linear mixed models to analyze itemized contributions to U.S. House campaigns. Our basic model is a system of Poisson processes that have means that are log-linear functions of normally distributed random effects. Our model permits multiple random effects, including serially correlated effects. The mixed model specification involves an integration over the random effects that is analytically intractable. When there is only one, serially independent random effect, the model may be estimated using quadrature to evaluate the integral. With multiple random effects, quadrature is infeasible but the model may be estimated using the Monte Carlo EM (MCEM) algorithm proposed by McCulloch (1997). We illustrate these various estimation methods. The system we analyze includes contributions to Democratic and Republican candidates from different sources, including individuals and PACs. We estimate dynamic effects both within and across contributions series. The cross-series dynamics measure how contributions to one candidate react to contributions to the other. The cross-series dynamics also measure how contributions to a candidate from one source can mobilize contributions from other sources. We use a combination of observed variables and random effects to test the hypothesis of dynamic mobilization against several hypotheses that imply constant differences between candidates and between districts. One such hypothesis is that some candidates received persistently higher contributions from all sources because of PAC endorsements. Another is that some candidates are simply better at raising money than others. We also test how national expectations about presidential election outcomes affect contributions. We apply our model to itemized contributions data for open seat races in the 1984 election.

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Coordination, Moderation and Institutional Balancing in American House Elections at Midterm Mebane, Walter R. Wand, Jonathan Uploaded 09-02-1999 Keywords campaign finance itemized contributions congressional elections generalized linear mixed model Monte Carlo EM random effects conditional compound Poisson process Abstract We use Federal Election Commission itemized contributions data from 1984 to estimate a model of campaign contributions in U.S. House elections. The model is a dynamic system of conditional compound Poisson processes in which there are contributions from both individuals and political action committees (PACs). The model includes random effects to allow for unobserved heterogeneity among districts and candidates. The dynamic effects measure how contributions to one candidate react to contributions to other candidates, as well as how contributions from individuals interact with contributions from PACs. We test the hypothesis that some candidates received higher contributions because of PAC endorsements. We also test whether national expectations about presidential election outcomes affect contributions to House candidates, as predicted by a policy moderating model. We use a Monte Carlo EM algorithm to optimize the likelihood of the model in specifications that include more than one random effect.

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A Panel Probit Analysis of Campaign Contributions and Roll Call Votes Wawro, Gregory Uploaded 09-07-1999 Keywords campaign finance panel data methods logit probit random effects GMM estimators Abstract Political scientists have long been concerned with the effects of campaign contributions on roll call voting. However, methodological problems have hampered attempts to assess the degree to which contributions affect voting. One of the key problems is that it is difficult to untangle the effect of contributions from the effect of a member's predisposition to vote one way or another. That is, political action committees (PACs) contribute to members of Congress who are likely to vote the way the PACs favor even in the absence of contributions. A PAC donation to a friendly member might be misconstrued as causing a member to vote a particular way, when in reality the member would have voted that way to begin with. It is therefore crucial to account for a member's propensity to vote in a particular way in order to assess the influence of contributions. One way that studies have done this is to use ideological ratings developed by interest groups. This approach is problematic, however, because the ratings are built from roll call votes and thus will introduce bias if campaign contributions affect the votes used to compute the ratings. In order to circumvent the problem of accounting for voting predispositions, I use panel data methods which, unfortunately, have seen almost no application in political science. These methods enable us to account for individual specific effects which are difficult or impossible to measure, such as the predisposition to vote for or against a particular type of legislation. To employ these methods, I build panels of roll call votes on legislation that business and labor groups have indicated are important for their interests. Using panel data estimators, I determine the effects of contributions from corporate and labor PACs on the probability of voting ``aye'' or ``nay'', while accounting for members' propensities to vote in particular directions. I find that contributions have minimal to no effects on roll call votes, while short-term factors including monthly unemployment and support for the president in the district have substantial effects.