Pragmatic Partners: Legislative Effectiveness and Interest Group Contributions

• In Event: Lawmaking Today

Abstract

One of the classic questions in political science is whether money buys policy in Congress. Research on this question is driven by the tension between the widespread belief that money matters and the mixed and nuanced findings in the academic literature. In this paper we offer a new take on this question by focusing on the partisanship of contributing groups and their impact on legislators’ behavior in office. We leverage a recent measure of the partisanship of interest groups, the Party Proximity Index (Meli 2023), to examine the overall partisan balance of contributions to each member of the House of Representatives during the 115th-117th congresses (2017-2022). Building on existing literature in both political science and psychology, we argue that there are both strategic and cognitive reasons to expect that legislators’ actions will be affected by the collective partisanship of interest groups who contribute to their campaigns. In short, the overall partisanship of the groups who contribute money to a member affects the way that the legislator perceives who they represent and their electoral calculations. The more money that a legislator receives from less partisan interest groups, the more likely the legislator is to believe that they have a supportive audience for less partisan and more pragmatic legislative activity. In contrast, a legislator who receives contributions from highly partisan groups will understand that their audience supports more partisan behavior in office. Using metrics established by the Center for Effective Lawmaking (Volden and Wiseman 2014) and the Lugar Center, we test these expectations by looking at two important elements of legislators’ behavior, effectiveness and partisanship, as well as the relationship between the two. We find that legislators who receive more money from groups with high PPI scores engage in more partisan behavior in office and display lower levels of legislative effectiveness. We will also examine whether the impact of contributions from groups with higher levels of partisanship results in legislators’ effectiveness being more heavily conditioned on being in the majority party. Focusing on the potential impact of less partisan groups, we find that legislators who receive more money from less partisan and more politically pragmatic groups are themselves more effective (and less partisan) lawmakers. This research contributes to the literature on the role of money in congressional politics as well as the broader topic of partisanship in Congress. When scholars and journalists try to explain why Congress is mired in partisanship, it is common to point at outside pressure from party-aligned interest groups as culprits, but doing so simplifies - and can mischaracterize - the role of interest groups. Our research sheds new light on these dynamics by showing that there is considerable variation in the party proximity of groups who give to members of Congress, and these differences are consequential for legislative behavior. Critically, this means that interest groups can be a force that drives legislators towards partisanship, but they can also encourage legislators to be more pragmatic, more effective, and less partisan in their lawmaking.

Authors

• Kris Miler, University of Maryland, College Park

• Amy D. Meli, University of Virginia