ALBERT

Notes: Abstract The present paper investigates the political feasibility of policies to control pollution and fishing. It first hypothesizes the following: when common or usufruct property rights are changed to full ownership, the new policy is not an unadulterated charge or auctioned license because of the implied wealth transfer. This hypothesis is “tested” by reviewing the cases in which full ownership rights have been established and is found to be consistent with the evidence. The paper then investigates the conditions that facilitate the development of full ownership rights. It concludes that proposing policies that are simple and incremental increases political feasibility, in large part because of greater understanding by fishermen and polluters.

Notes: Conclusions This paper has specified and estimated a model of the interaction between money and voting in American politics. Convincingly establishing the identification of a system of equations can be difficult even when theory provides a guide. In the study of money in politics, however, no theoretical perspective has been established in the literature. To make the case for identification as unambiguous as possible, this paper has done two things. First, the specification was based, in part, on theory which has formally been developed elsewhere and which satisfactorily describes data at the economic interest group level (Welch, 1980). Second, part of the question of identification revolves around the relationship between party strength and socioeconomic variables. Because there are questions as to the best measurement of party strength, results based on two measures were presented. For a number of reasons, the Presidential vote was the preferred measure. This study draws four conclusions. First, money influenced voting in U.S. House elections in 1972, although its effect was ‘small’. Second, patterns of total contributions to a U.S. House candidate are consistent with the hypothesis that a majority of dollars come from contributors who prefer to support likely winners. Third, the total contributions made to a candidate are a positive function of the district's median years of schooling completed and the Gini coefficient. Total contributions made to a Democratic candidate are also a positive function of the median income. Finally, had House campaigns been financed in the early 1970s, even to the point of giving each major party candidate $150,000 (in 1978 dollars), few elections would have been changed. It is also worth mentioning some of the things about the financing of political campaigns that we still do not know. The above conclusions involve only elections to the U.S. House; there are good reasons for suspecting that money is more influential in U.S. Senate elections. OLS statistics support this belief and the greater visibility of those races help justify it. Although money has little effect on House elections, we do not know whether contributions affect legislative voting in the House. Representatives apparently believe that expenditure influences their reelection chances. Given the complexity of the process, it should be no surprise that this belief conflicts with our findings. Acting on this belief, a Representative's vote may very well be influenced by the sources of his contributions, either directly or indirectly through the giving of access to contributors. Finally, we should be reminded that the above model is static while the electoral process is dynamic. The amount contributed to a candidate is affected by his probability of winning in the previous time period (e.g. week, month) and in turn affects that probability in the following time period. As usual, what we know is overshadowed by what we do not know. The above questions are both interesting in their own right and of interest to policy making.

Notes: Conclusion and summary We have constructed two models of how economic interest groups allocate their campaign monies between candidates for the same legislative house. The models make contrasting assumptions regarding an interest group's strategy for affecting policy outcomes. One model assumes contributions are given to affect election probabilities while the other assumes that contributions are exchanged for political favors. The validity of these assumptions can best be examined by testing the predictions of the two models. The contribution functions of seven economic interest groups to 1974 candidates for the U.S. House were estimated with Tobit analysis. A beta functional form was used, with expected vote percentage and voting score as independent variables. For all seven groups, the mode of this function was significantly different from fifty percent of the expected vote, supporting the prediction that economic contributors prefer likely winners. This result tends to support the assumption that an economic interest group contributes in order to obtain political favors, not to affect electoral outcomes. Although we cannot exclude the possibility that some mixed strategy is followed, the strategy described by the exchange model appears to have dominated economic interest group giving in the 1974 U.S. House races.

Notes: Abstract Three times in recent years American Presidents have tried to levy a tax on imported oil in order to decrease the quantity. Three times, the U.S. Congress has blocked the policy, demonstrating that a tax is politically infeasible. As an alternative, we propose an auctioned import license policy, in which the President would have discretion over the quantity of petroleum sold each month. The quantity might be chosen to maintain a certain differential between the domestic and international prices of oil. Under this strategy, licenses would have economic characteristics very similar to those of a tax. The political characteristics, however, would be quite different. Sections of the public would be less likely to perceive licenses as transferring revenues from households to the government and more likely to perceive them as effective in reducing imports. Alternatively, oil import licenses could be used to negotiate with OPEC and other importing nations.