Legislative Subsidy or Belief Diffusion? The Battle Over Housing Finance in the run-up to the Financial Crisis (original) (raw)

2014

Abstract

In 1989, Berry and Wilcox argued that the combination of America’s two party system, the 1960s decline in party organizations, and the 1974 changes in election law had placed interest group politics at the center of American policymaking. However, the evidence of any causal chain flowing from interest group donations to legislative votes remains enigmatic. Interest groups tend to support members whose roll–call votes are already predictable on the basis of ideology, which we would not expect in vote-buying scenarios. Some of this evidence suggests interest group resources simply provide a legislative subsidy to supportive members. On the other hand, much interest group influence occurs at the committee level, where members may self-select into smaller components of the ideological spectrum. Such scenarios might lead researchers to underestimate interest group influence. On either side, little of the existing literature addresses whether interest groups affect the way members underst...

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