Greed as a Source of Polarization

Igor Livshits and Mark Wright

No 18-1, Working Papers from Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia

Abstract: The political process in the United States appears to be highly polarized: evidence from voting patterns finds that the political positions of legislators have diverged substantially, while the largest campaign contributions come from the most extreme lobby groups and are directed to the most extreme candidates. Is the rise in campaign contributions the cause of the growing polarity of political views? In this paper, we show that, in standard models of lobbying and electoral competition, a free-rider problem amongst potential contributors leads naturally to a divergence in campaign contributors without any divergence in candidates' policy positions. However, we go on to show that a modest departure from standard assumptions | allowing candidates to directly value campaign contributions (because of \ego rents\" or because lax auditing allows them to misappropriate some of these funds) | delivers the ability of campaign contributions to cause policy divergence.

Keywords: Polarization; Campaign Contributions; Agendas (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 H41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 25 pages
Date: 2017-12-28
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-pol
Note: this paper is SUPERCEDED by WP 22-29 "Polarized Contributions but Convergent Agenda"
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.philadelphiafed.org/-/media/frbp/asset ... ers/2022/wp22-29.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Greed as a Source of Polarization (2007)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:fedpwp:18-1

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

DOI: 10.21799/frbp.wp.2022.29

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Beth Paul ().