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Working Paper
Polarized Contributions but Convergent Agendas
In a canonical model of policy formation, campaign contributions, and electoral competition, we show that, despite donor polarization, candidates’ agendas converge. If purely office-motivated candidates move away from the centrist agenda, they increase their opponents’ contributions more than their own. An extension that introduces a “job ladder” for the candidates leads to candidates caring about absolute levels of campaign contributions and generates divergence of political agendas in equilibrium. We provide empirical evidence of campaign contributions affecting candidates’ ...
Working Paper
Greed as a Source of Polarization
The political process in the United States appears to be highly polarized: evidence from voting patterns finds that the political positions of legislators have diverged substantially, while the largest campaign contributions come from the most extreme lobby groups and are directed to the most extreme candidates. Is the rise in campaign contributions the cause of the growing polarity of political views? In this paper, we show that, in standard models of lobbying and electoral competition, a free-rider problem amongst potential contributors leads naturally to a divergence in campaign ...