Agents In the Politics Industry

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Political scientists have become increasingly aware that individuals who work in politics but are not themselves officeholders--such as legislative staff, lobbyists, and campaign consultants--exert a distinct influence in American politics (e.g., Sheingate 2016; Montgomery and Nyhan 2017; Martin and Peskowitz 2018). Nonetheless, many open questions remain about the causes and consequences of the independent nature of these “agents in the politics industry.” Specifically, when do these agents serve the best interest of their principals, and when do principal-agent problems arise instead? What are the implications of their autonomy for political representation and policymaking in the United States? And how do our answers to these questions depend on these individual agents' incentives, information, and the institutional environment in which they are situated? By bringing together four papers that speak to these questions in a variety of contexts, this panel seeks to highlight the importance of understanding principal-agent problems in political organizations and parties.

Two papers on this panel examine the role of legislative staff as information gate-keepers for policymakers. Using an original survey of state legislators and their staffers, Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, Matto Mildenberger, and Leah Stokes examine sources of political elites’ misconceptions of their constituents’ policy preferences. A series of hypothesis tests on both observational and experimental data reveals that legislative staff is an important factor in accounting for how such misconceptions vary across individual lawmakers as well as state legislatures.

Turning our attention to Congress, Alexander C. Furnas demonstrates that rather than being faithful agents to members of Congress, congressional staff may skew the process by which Congress acquires policy-relevant information. Using both original survey data from the 2017 Congressional Capacity Survey as well as an experiment embedded in the 2019 Congressional Capacity Survey, Furnas finds that staffers, due to both career aspirations and cognitive biases, are more likely to trust and select sources of information that are congruent with their own ideological preferences. These staffers thus exercise considerable leeway in presenting biased information to their bosses.

As another important group of agents that shape the policymaking process, lobbyists are often portrayed as “hired guns” who cash in on political connections in the popular press. Challenging this depiction of lobbyists, Alexander V. Hirsch, Karam Kang, B. Pablo Montagnes, and Hye Young You develop and test a formal model in which a lobbyist derives value from her ability to screen which clients she brings to a politician, thereby earn said politician’s trust. The credibility of a lobbyist in selectively taking on clients may be undermined by her profit motive, but can be enhanced by her alignment with the interest of a politician due to ideological congruence or personal connection. Using a unique dataset from reports mandated by the Foreign Agents Registration Act, this paper finds that lobbyists become more selective when they are more ideologically aligned with politicians, consistent with model predictions.

Last but not least, campaign consultants may be financially motivated to exploit regulatory loopholes in ways that degrade the electoral process. Zhao Li’s work highlights such an example that has attracted considerable press attention--the rise of “scam PACs,” which are political action committees (PACs) that raise campaign donations to enrich their creators (such as campaign consultants) instead of advancing the campaigns or causes that they purport to champion. The proliferation of scam PACs, and the lack of regulatory oversight, not only undermines PACs’ accountability to donors, but also generates a lemons problem in the broader political marketplace. Li will present a quantitative assessment of scam PACs that have been identified by media reports, including these PACs’ distinct expenditure patterns, donor characteristics, and vendor networks. Building on these descriptive analyses, Li will estimate a supervised learning algorithm that systematically identifies scam PACs in U.S. federal elections.

Sub Unit

• Division 35: Political Organizations and Parties

Individual Presentations

• State Legislators, Their Staffers and Representation of the American Public - Matto Mildenberger, University of California Santa Barbara; Leah Stokes, UCSB; Alexander Warren Hertel-Fernandez, Columbia University

• Staff Ideology, Motivated Reasoning, and Information Distortion in Congress - Alexander Charles Furnas, University of Michigan

• Lobbyists as Gatekeepers: Theory and Evidence - Alexander Victor Hirsch, California Institute of Technology; Karam Kang, Carnegie Mellon University; Brendan Pablo Montagnes, Emory University; Hye Young You, New York University

• Lemons in the Political Marketplace: A Big-Data Approach to Detect “Scam PACs” - Zhao Li, Princeton University

Chair

• Zhao Li Princeton University

Discussants

• Gregory John Martin Stanford University

• Timothy M. LaPira James Madison University