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 a truly exogenous variable, we employ an instrumental variable 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 further 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 those same votes - at least in this high-profile policy domain.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 120-129 |
Number of pages | 10 |
Journal | Social Science Research |
Volume | 41 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Jan 2012 |
Externally published | Yes |
All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes
- Education
- Sociology and Political Science
Keywords
- 2SLS
- Congress
- Influence peddling
- Offspring sex mix
- PAC
- Vote buying