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Do campaign contributions buy favorable policies? Evidence from the insurance industry

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 January 2021

Alexander Fouirnaies  and
Anthony Fowler Open the ORCID record for Anthony Fowler [Opens in a new window]
Alexander Fouirnaies
Affiliation:
Harris School of Public Policy Studies, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA
Anthony Fowler*
Affiliation:
Harris School of Public Policy Studies, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA
*
*Corresponding author. Email: anthony.fowler@uchicago.edu
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Abstract

To learn about the effects of corporate campaign contributions, we study the potential influence of the insurance industry in US state politics. The insurance industry is one of the biggest players in state politics, and we have collected new data on objective measures of the industry's performance in each state over time. We exploit within-state changes in campaign finance regulations which can significantly restrict the ability of corporate contributors to give money and potentially influence elected officials. Across a range of outcomes and campaign finance reforms, we find little evidence that the ability to make corporate campaign contributions benefits the insurance industry in a state. Some results suggest that the ability to make campaign contributions may benefit the insurance industry in states with elected insurance commissioners, but overall, campaign contributions appear to have a little distortionary effect even in a setting where we would most expect to find it.

Keywords

American politicscomparative politics: political institutionselections and campaignspolitical economystate and intergovernmental politics
Type
Original Article
Information
Political Science Research and Methods , Volume 10 , Issue 1 , January 2022 , pp. 18 - 32
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the European Political Science Association

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Supplementary material: Link

Fouirnaies and Fowler Dataset

Dataset

https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/ZJ0KSH
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