Influencing Connected Legislators

Marco Battaglini and Eleonora Patacchini

No 22739, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper studies how interest groups allocate campaign contributions when congressmen are connected by social ties. We establish conditions for the existence of a unique Nash equilibrium in pure strategies for the contribution game and characterize the associated allocation of the interest groups' moneys. While the allocations are generally complex functions of the environment (the voting function, the legislators' preferences and the social network topology), they are simple, monotonically increasing functions of the respective legislators' Bonacich centralities when the legislators are office motivated or the number of legislators is large. Using data on the 109th-113th Congresses and on congressmen's alumni connections, we estimate the model and find evidence supporting its predictions.

JEL-codes: D72 D78 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pol
Note: POL
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Published as Marco Battaglini & Eleonora Patacchini, 2018. "Influencing Connected Legislators," Journal of Political Economy, vol 126(6), pages 2277-2322.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w22739.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Influencing Connected Legislators (2018)
Working Paper: Influencing Connected Legislators (2016)
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:nbr:nberwo:22739

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w22739

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().