Money in Politics

In new research, Nolan McCarty and Sepehr Shahshahani find that, contrary to the concerns of Neo-Brandeisians, Market et power does not correlate with political power via outsized lobbying.

With slightly more than one year until the United States presidential election, electoral campaigns are about to ramp up. These quadrennial elections, like so many others in democracies worldwide, will mobilize thousands of campaign workers who play an integral role in shaping candidates’ electoral performance. Yet, little is known about these workers and how the experience of working in a campaign shapes their professional lives. This column describes the findings from a new study on the career trajectories of campaign labor in Brazil, showing that connections forged on a campaign provide qualified workers with better employment and earnings opportunities. This article was originally published in VoxEU.

Pablo Balán explains that family ties provide firms with an edge in collective action that enables them to be politically active through campaign donations, to engage in financial rent-seeking by obtaining subsidized state credit, and to bypass regulation seeking to curtail the influence of business by substituting individual contributions for corporate contributions. Scholars and advocates can benefit from a deeper understanding of organizational constraints to programmatic reform.

In new research, Marco Grotteria, Max Miller, and S Lakshmi Naaraayanan create and analyze a dataset of more than 12,000 FARA filings to investigate the drivers and outcomes of foreign lobbying of U.S. legislators. Their findings can help inform new laws and regulations that improve government transparency and prevent the more nefarious effects of foreign lobbying.

Friedrich Hayek viewed the subject of rent-seeking not from the usual welfare economics perspective, but from a constitutional economics perspective. In a...

In new research, Şenay Ağca and Deniz Igan use the shock of the September 11 attacks and declaration of war on Afghanistan...

A new paper examines the relationship between the rising concentration in institutional investors' ownership of publicly traded U.S. firms and portfolio companies'...

A recent poll shows that 71% of Americans view large companies negatively. The change has been driven by Republicans who dislike the...

The Citizens United ruling contradicts the Founders, decades of Supreme Court precedent and the will of the American people.

Citizens United v. FEC stands in the public eye as the U.S. Supreme Court case that flooded U.S. elections with “dark money”...