Money in politics is bad, m'kay?

Yes, it is an old talking point. But it is still very relevant. This paper gives a nice summary of issues, but also looks at measuring the effect of donations on ideological extremism.

Quote:

Concluding Remarks Who do legislators represent while in office? This paper shows that senators are most representative of campaign contributors. I illustrate this point by estimating the ideological positions of legislators, voters and contributors on a unified ideological scale. I do this by linking roll call votes by senators in the 112th Congress with survey responses of voters in the CCES and of donors in an original survey of campaign contributors. Results show that legislators’ ideologies most closely align with the preferences of campaign contributors while senators ideal points are quite distant from the ideological preferences of the average voter. The distance between voters and their senator is nearly as large as if voters were randomly assigned to their senator, indicating that congruence between voters and their representatives in Congress is quite weak.

Linky.



(Bold is tl;dr summary)



In addition:

Quote:

Another way of measuring polarization among senators is to calculate the percentage of voters, co-partisans, and donors who are more extreme than the senator. To calculate this, I find the percentage of donors that have ideal points to the left of Democratic senators or to the right of Republican senators. Figure 7 shows that contributors consistently hold ideological positions that are more extreme than the senator. The story is quite different among voters and even supporters. In nearly every case, 75 percent of voters are less extreme than the senator, and in most cases a majority of supporters are less extreme than the senator.

There is a certain school of thought that says money is just the equivalent of speech, and we have all sorts of PACs and special interests on both sides of the aisle spending money, so it all evens out in the end. This suggests this is not the case.

via International Skeptics Forum http://ift.tt/1aEJZct