This project investigates voter behavior due to seniority advantage in Congress. It is possible that voters compete for pork barrel funds by reelecting incumbents to maintain seniority. This leads to a transfer of tax dollars from districts or states with junior legislators to those with more senior ones. Primary interest lies in discovering whether voters respond more to monetary rewards or visceral stimulation caused by policy representation. Term limits are also considered as a mechanism to reduce the cost of electing a challenger as well as reducing the asymmetry in pork barrel distribution. Controlled laboratory experiments are utilized where subjects are divided into districts and act as legislators and voters.
Intellectual Merit: There are no previous experimental studies that test subject reactions to monetary payoffs against reactions to visceral stimulation, let alone in a setting as relevant as voting. Much of the existing literature on seniority advantage proposes that voters prefer monetary benefits to policy representation, but this is the first attempt to test that belief. The experimental design is novel in its use of visceral stimulation via political issues as well as the method by which subjects express policy support through donations to foundations that support particular sides of the featured political issue. Finding that voters weigh monetary benefits less heavily in the voting decision than policy representation will impact the way economists and political scientists view vote choice. Such a finding would also lead naturally to investigating the evolution of voting behavior and whether this result is a natural response to incentives or whether voters have been conditioned by current institutions.
Broader Impacts: If term limits are found to be effective at reducing disparity in tax benefits as well reducing the cost of searching for better policy representation, serious consideration should be given to changing the internal institutions of Congress.
Seniority in Congress creates an advantage in pork-barrel legislation and distorts voter incentives . First, it potentially creates a collective action problem where voters sacrifice representation on policy issues by reelecting incumbents because of the implicit cost of foregone federal spending in their district or state i.e. pork. Second, competition for pork leads to frequent reelection of incumbents causing a redistribution of income to districts with senior legislators . This project uses a controlled environment to determine whether subjects react to these incentives in the laboratory and whether term limits increase a voter’s willingness to search for a legislator who represents their policy preferences by reducing the implicit cost of replacing an incumbent. I also test whether they are effective at reducing the asymmetrically redistributive nature of pork barrel legislation. In the lab, subjects are divided into districts and act as legislators and voters. Legislators set taxes that fund pork barrel projects, which are awarded by seniority in the legislature. To create a setting where a policy issue could realistically compete with monetary incentives I chose to use abortion, a topic about which even politically uninformed individuals have a distinct opinion. I hoped to employ hot cognitions to introduce affect into the voters’ decision process. That is, I hoped to provoke feelings without requiring the subjects to think much about their preference and why they may or may not identify with a legislator’s choice. Voters could express their preference through voting or suppress it in favor of collecting the monetary reward. Policy choice is operationalized through the novel use of donations to a pro-life and pro-choice foundation, where legislators vote to determine how the donations are allocated (NSF funds were not used for donations). Using survey data on subjects’ preferences, voters begin with incumbents who have opposing policy preferences to their own, but voters are only able to determine legislator preference through policy choices. They determine whether incumbents stay in office or are replaced by an unproven challenger. The simple model predicts that voters concerned with monetary payoffs reelect the incumbents in order to maintain an advantage in pork barrel spending, regardless of policy choices by legislators. Term limits are imposed with the expectation that the voters become more willing to search for legislators who choose policies consistent with the district majority as the cost of replacing an incumbent legislator decreases. The distribution of income is predicted to equalize across districts because of the cap on seniority advantage as well. I find that subjects respond more to the benefits of seniority than to the visceral stimulation of the policy issue. However, incumbents do not fully use their seniority advantage to craft policy according to personal preference. When legislators are not term limited, reelection rates for senior incumbents who vote against district majorities are high but are slightly lower than those senior incumbents who vote with the district majority. On the other hand, junior incumbents who vote against the district majority are reelected at a much lower rate than senior incumbents in general and junior incumbents who vote with the district majority. Thus voters respond to the policy issue when the cost of doing so is relatively low. An important result of the paper is that legislator shirking decreases an individual voter’s likelihood of voting for the incumbent, but groups of voters are unable to coordinate their votes in order to elect a challenger. This highlights the importance of the electoral process in aggregating individual preferences. Term limits do significantly affect the willingness of voters to reelect senior incumbents who vote against the district majority, but this effect does not show up in the reelection rates. Finally, it is likely that term limits do have an impact on the distribution of income resulting from pork barrel spending.
