Interest-Group PACsmanship: An Analysis of Campaign Contributions, Issue Visibility, and Legislative Impact

In this article the effects of special-interest campaign contributions, party, and constituency (mediated by issue visibility on prolabor and probusiness legislative outcomes) are examined for the 99th Congress. Labor contributions have marginally greater impact than business contributions on legislative outcomes, although labor money “counts” less for high-visibility labor issues. Labor money also has more of an impact against probusiness voting. Party is the most important predictor of legislative outcomes and is not conditioned by issue visibility. One interpretation of the findings is that labor is marginally better than business in achieving its goals. An alternative interpretation is that business has less of a stake than labor in legislative outcomes because of its greater involvement in politics outside of the electoral process, which partly explains labor's success on some issues of marginal importance and its failure on more significant ones.