Political Action Committee Donations to Incumbent Senators; a Corruption Motive

Posted: 19 Sep 2019

See all articles by Brian Flaxman

Brian Flaxman

University of Colorado-Boulder

Date Written: September 10, 2019

Abstract

This paper utilizes six-year Senate terms and two-year reporting periods to analyze if Political Action Committees are using their donations to influence the actions of sitting Senators as opposed to simply trying to get those with favorable policy views re-elected. Senators that are early in their careers who will have more influence in the long-term as well as Senators who currently already have influence would be those more likely to be targeted by Political Action Committees for this motive. Using clustered OLS regression with fixed effects and interaction terms, I find that there is in fact a "corruption" motive when it comes to Political Action Committees donating to sitting US Senators.

Keywords: campaign finance, political action committee, political economy, United States Senate

JEL Classification: C13, C21, D71, D72, D73, D78, H10, H11, K16, P16

Suggested Citation

Flaxman, Brian, Political Action Committee Donations to Incumbent Senators; a Corruption Motive (September 10, 2019). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3451362

Brian Flaxman (Contact Author)

University of Colorado-Boulder ( email )

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