TY  - JOUR
AU  - Conley,Dalton
AU  - McCabe,Brian J.
TI  - Bribery or Just Desserts? Evidence on the Influence of Congressional Voting Patterns on PAC Contributions from Exogenous Variation in the Sex Mix of Legislator Offspring
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 13945
PY  - 2008
Y2  - April 2008
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13945
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13945.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Dalton Conley
New York University
249 West 29th Street #2E
New York, NY  10001-5230
Tel: 212/998-7580
Fax: 212/995-4140
E-Mail: conley@nyu.edu

Brian J. McCabe
New York University
295 Lafayette Street 4th Floor
New York, NY 10001
E-Mail: bjmcc@nyu.edu
AB  - Evidence on the relationship between political contributions and legislators' voting behavior is marred by concerns about endogeneity in the estimation process.  Using a legislator's offspring sex mix as an exogenous variable, we employ a two-stage least squares estimation procedure to predict the effect of voting behavior on political contributions.  Following previous research, we find that a legislator's proportion daughters has a significant effect on voting behavior for women's issues, as measured by score in the "Congressional Record on Choice" issued by NARAL Pro-Choice America.  In the second stage, we make a unique contribution by demonstrating a significant impact of exogenous voting behavior on PAC contributions, lending credibility to the hypothesis that Political Action Committees respond to legislators' voting patterns by "rewarding" political candidates that vote in line with the positions of the PAC, rather than affecting or "bribing" those same votes -- at least in this high profile policy domain.
ER  -