The forthcoming article “Vote buying and negative agenda control: A problem for the study of money in politics” by Andre Van Parys is summarized by the author below.
Politicians, pundits, and ordinary citizens frequently argue that money has an outsized influence on U.S. politics. Yet research on the effect of money on politicians’ behavior finds limited effects, especially on voting behavior. In this paper, I construct a formal model to show that these limited effects may be an artifact of the strategic interactions between vote buying and negative agenda control. Specifically, a roll call vote may fail to occur precisely because special interests have convinced the relevant legislators to oppose the bill, leading to challenges in empirically estimating the effect of money on votes.
The model features three actors: an agenda setter who proposes a policy, a legislator whose policy preferences are private information, and an interest group that can offer transfers to influence the legislator’s choice. The key feature is that the agenda setter can learn the legislator’s intended vote (for example, through public statements or whipping) and then decide whether it is worth paying the cost of bringing the proposal to the floor.
The model yields two main implications. First, vote buying can be effective even when no vote occurs. If an interest group prefers the status quo to a proposed change, it can pay the legislator to oppose the bill. Anticipating defeat, the agenda setter rationally tables the proposal, meaning the influenced “vote” is not observed. Second, the model clarifies when this hidden influence is most likely: when uncertainty about the legislator’s ideal point is high, the agenda setter and interest group are relatively extreme, and the legislator is relatively moderate.
I then connect these predictions to the 2021 negotiations over the Build Back Better Act. In that episode, the bill never came to the Senate floor amidst intense attention on two pivotal Democrats, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, and widespread speculation about donor pressure. Using the synthetic control method, I estimate whether these pivotal senators received more campaign contributions than they would have absent the bill’s consideration. I find that Sinema, but not Manchin, received significantly more contributions. These findings suggest that interest groups can and do spend strategically to block major legislation even when no formal vote occurs. Thus, the votes that we observe are unrepresentative of vote buying efforts from interest groups, leading many empirical designs to underestimate the effect of money on legislators’ voting behavior.
About the Author: Andre Van Parys is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the University of Rochester. Their research “Vote buying and negative agenda control: A problem for the study of money in politics” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.
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