Freedomnomics: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don't

to seven years? Candidates who show conservative leanings in their research, social discussions, or lifestyle choices can thereby be weeded out. The end result: studies show that 96 percent of registered voters among liberal arts professors in top-rated schools such as Harvard and Cornell are Democratic or Green Party members,11 while 86 percent are Democrats at large state schools like the University of Texas and Penn State.12 Thus the tenure process tends to result in the promotion of professors who are both liberal and hard-working.
The point here is that it might be easy to fake dedication to a certain political philosophy or to a good work ethic, but people who genuinely believe in these things, especially over a long time, will appear more convincing. Evaluators can typically distinguish between the two groups, and they will usually pick the latter to become Supreme Court justices or tenured professors. Justices offer consistent rulings after receiving lifetime appointments for the same reason that professors remain hard-working and liberal even after getting tenure—because both groups reached their positions as the result of a sorting process that eliminates insincere or uncommitted candidates.13
Politicians go through this same vetting process. A politician may be able to fake an allegiance to a set of principles. He may parrot the “right” slogans and even vote the “right” way in order to get re-elected. But voters, like presidents and faculty members, can distinguish between sincere and insincere politicians, especially over a long period of time. And they reward the sincere ones with their votes.14
Contrary to popular belief, politicians who get elected and re-elected tend to be the ones who show that they really believe in the positions they espouse.
Politicians from Kansas really do think that farmers are the backbone of America. Those from Detroit really do want to help the car industry. This is why politicians keep their promises even during their final terms—they don’t promise to support certain positions merely in order to win re-election, but rather because they genuinely believe in those positions.
Why Do People Donate Money to Political Campaigns?
People often point to political campaign financing as a prime example of the corrupt nature of the U.S. political system. Big corporations, wealthy individuals, and powerful political action committees (PACs) allegedly buy influence from politicians, who then focus on pleasing their big donors at the expense of the little guy. This outlook presupposes that when someone donates to a politician, he is hoping to affect the politician’s votes in his favor—in effect, he’s looking to “buy” the politician’s votes.
Labor unions, business groups, lawyers, doctors, and a galaxy of special interest groups all regularly donate money to politicians. But the surprise here is that these contributions, in fact, do not significantly alter how individual politicians vote. What’s more, donors do not expect them to do so.
The main evidence for the view of political donations as an exercise in vote-buying is that politicians tend to vote in line with the wishes of their donors. Very few people would deny this is true. But an analysis of donation and voting patterns reveals that donors support politicians for the same reason voters do: politicians intrinsically value policies, and donors give to candidates who share their values. Vote-buying is not occurring because individual politicians are not altering their votes based on donations.
Analyzing this dilemma is a bit tricky: how can we figure out whether donors are giving money to candidates because they want to affect the politicians’ votes or because they agree with the politicians’ values and positions?
One way to approach this dilemma is to take another look at retiring politicians. When politicians decide not to run for re-election, they no longer have to worry about adhering to donors’ wishes in order to secure contributions for future elections. If donors are bribing politicians to vote differently than they otherwise would have voted, politicians should shift at least somewhat away from the voting interests of their donors when they no longer have to worry about losing these donations. But if donors support politicians based upon the politicians’ genuine beliefs, there should be little change in politicians’ voting patterns once they decide to retire.
Economist Steve Bronars and I examined the voting records of the 731 congressmen who held office for at least two terms between 1975 and 1990. We found that congressmen do continue their previous voting patterns after they announce their intention to retire, even when accounting for other explanations such as whether they will secure other jobs after their retirement from politics. Although retiring politicians only receive 15 percent of the amount of PAC contributions that they enjoyed in the preceding term, their voting pattern remains virtually identical; on average they only alter their position on one out of every 450 votes.15
Even politicians who raked in hundreds of thousands of extra dollars during their second-to-last term did not significantly change their voting patterns. Politicians consistently vote the same way over their entire careers, regardless of the onset or the end of donations from any particular interest group.16
This is not to say that cases of influence-peddling and outright bribery never occur. In 1978, for example, the FBI launched ABSCAM, a corruption sting that resulted in the conviction of one senator and six congressmen for accepting bribes from fictitious Middle Eastern businessmen. More recently, we have seen an unusual number of bribery cases: California congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham was caught taking bribes from defense contractors; Louisiana congressman William Jefferson was investigated for allegedly accepting $400,000 in bribes in return for helping a telecom company secure business in Nigeria and Ghana (the FBI found $90,000 in cash in Jefferson’s freezer); and most famously, lobbyist Jack Abramoff was convicted on corruption-related charges that implicated several congressmen and staffers including Ohio representative Bob Ney, who was forced to resign from office and later convicted of related charges.17
Everyone loves a good corruption story. The corrupt politician is an iconic image in American popular culture, and the torrent of headlines generated by stories like