 How money drives US congressional elections: Linear models of money and outcomesThomas Ferguson, Paul Jorgensen and Jie Chen Structural Change and Economic Dynamics, 2022, vol. 61, issue C, 527-545 Abstract: This paper analyzes whether money influences election outcomes. Using a new and more comprehensive dataset built from government sources, the paper shows that the relations between money and votes cast for major parties in elections for the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives from 1980 to 2018 are well approximated by straight lines. It then considers possible challenges to this “linear model” of money and elections on statistical grounds, resting on possible endogeneity arising from reciprocal causation between, for example, popularity and votes. The paper develops a spatial Bayesian latent instrumental variable model to tackle this much discussed problem. It checks its results by studying relations between changes in gambling odds and contributions in key elections. Both approaches suggest that reciprocal causation may happen to some degree, but that money’s independent influence on elections remains powerful. Keywords: Political money; Regulation; Elections; Political economy; United States government; Campaign finance (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:streco:v:61:y:2022:i:c:p:527-545 DOI: 10.1016/j.strueco.2019.09.005 Access Statistics for this article Structural Change and Economic Dynamics is currently edited by F. Duchin, H. Hagemann, M. Landesmann, R. Scazzieri, A. Steenge and B. Verspagen More articles in Structural Change and Economic Dynamics from Elsevier |
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