Skip to main content
Disciplines
Automotive Business IT + Informatics Construction + Real Estate Electrical Engineering + Electronics Energy + Sustainability Insurance + Risk Finance + Banking Management + Leadership Marketing + Sales Mechanical Engineering + Materials
Events
DE
EN
Books
Journals
Topic Page
Marketing
Start single access now
Access for companies
EXTENDED SEARCH
Log in
Top
Political Behavior
Published in: Political Behavior 2/2021

15-10-2019 | Original Paper

The Effect of Distributive Politics on Electoral Participation: Evidence from 70 Million Agricultural Payments

Published in: Political Behavior | Issue 2/2021

Log in

Activate our intelligent search to find suitable subject content or patents.

search-config
loading …

Abstract

Policy feedbacks take place when public policies change mass participation and mobilize key constituencies. This can influence future rounds of policymaking and solidify government programs. We explore policy feedback in the context of a particularistic policy targeted to a specific electoral constituency: agricultural producers receiving payments from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). We exploit a novel dataset of: (1) payments distributed to producers by the USDA; and (2) participation in elections for the Farm Service Agency county committees that help administer these payments. The data are novel in that we rely on individual-level administrative histories of actual payments made by the USDA as well as documented forms of participation such as voting in elections and running for office. We find that receiving agricultural payments is associated with a 20% increase in the probability of voting in county elections, a 34% increase in the probability of running for office, and a 25% increase in the probability of winning office.
previous article Educational Attainment and Social Norms of Voting
next article Cultivating Youth Engagement: Race & the Behavioral Effects of Critical Pedagogy

Dont have a licence yet? Then find out more about our products and how to get one now:

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

  • über 102.000 Bücher
  • über 537 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

  • Automobil + Motoren
  • Bauwesen + Immobilien
  • Business IT + Informatik
  • Elektrotechnik + Elektronik
  • Energie + Nachhaltigkeit
  • Finance + Banking
  • Management + Führung
  • Marketing + Vertrieb
  • Maschinenbau + Werkstoffe
  • Versicherung + Risiko

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

inform now

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

  • über 67.000 Bücher
  • über 340 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

  • Bauwesen + Immobilien
  • Business IT + Informatik
  • Finance + Banking
  • Management + Führung
  • Marketing + Vertrieb
  • Versicherung + Risiko




Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

inform now
Appendix
Available only for authorised users
Footnotes
1
Notable exceptions are recent papers on labor policy (Anzia and Moe 2016; Feigenbaum et al. 2018).
 
2
A producer is defined as a farm “owner, operator, landlord, tenant or sharecropper, who shares in the risk of the agricultural product (crops, bees, livestock, etc.) and who is entitled to share in the product available from the farm, or would have shared had the product been produced” (see 7 CFR 718.2).
 
3
We draw upon Campbell (2012) for this review.
 
4
Clinton and Sances (2018), for example, use county-level measures of voter turnout and the percentage of citizens eligible for Medicaid. In contrast, the individual-level data used here do not require us to make ecological inferences.
 
5
Anzia and Moe (In press) explore a similar context where public sector unions hold positions on state boards that administer public pensions.
 
7
A local administrative area is a subdivision of the county. The area under a county committee’s jurisdiction is divided into three to five (but as many as eleven) administrative areas.
 
8
Producers are sometimes eligible to participate in the elections of another LAA if they hold farming interest in that county; these producers comprise approximately 3.1% of the sample of all producers.
 
9
An individual is allowed to nominate herself.
 
11
This program, along with the Average Crop Revenue Election (ACRE) program, were authorized only through the 2013 program year, and are now obsolete. DCP and ACRE were replaced by the Agricultural Risk Coverage (ARC) and Price Loss Coverage (PLC) programs for the 2014 through 2018 program years by the Agricultural Act of 2014 (2014 Farm Bill).
 
14
Results are similar when including producers who are registered as organizations (see Online Appendix Tables OA1 and OA2).
 
15
We also estimate models predicting whether they won the election and ended up serving on the committee, along with models predicting whether they served on the committee regardless of whether it was through an election or as a voting-member socially disadvantaged (SDA) appointment. We exclude non-voting advisors. Results are similar across the board (see Online Appendix Tables OA13 and OA14).
 
16
We add one dollar to all payment amounts so that the value of the independent variable is defined for producers.
 
17
We exclude the 0.62% of producers who ever received any negative payments as such cases suggest compensation for overpayment in previous years and we do not observe the full history of payments prior to 2009.
 
18
All models also include election year fixed effects. We present linear models for ease of interpretation. In Online Appendix Tables OA5-OA8, we report pooled logistic regressions as well as logistic regressions with producer fixed effects (i.e., conditional logit) (Chamberlain 1980) and obtain similar results. The conditional logit model addresses the incidental parameters problem in logistic regression (Beck 2018).
 
19
Producers clearly have other means of political influence beyond participation in county committee elections such as major party membership, campaign donations, and involvement with industry associations.
 
20
Although outside the focus of the current study, we note that these results also underscore the importance of outreach programs organized by the USDA in order to enhance participation in COC elections. To the extent that these mobilization programs are successful they could not only increase participation on average but also level the current gaps in participation across producers who receive differing payment amounts.
 
Literature
Anzia, S. F., & Moe, T. M. (2016). Do politicians use policy to make politics? The case of public-sector labor laws. American Political Science Review, 110(4), 763–777.CrossRef
Anzia, S. F., & Moe, T. M. (In press). Interest groups on the inside: The governance of public pension funds. Perspectives on Politics.
Beck, N. (2018). Estimating grouped data models with a binary dependent variable and fixed effects: What are the issues? arXiv:​1809.​06505.
Burden, B. C. (2000). Voter turnout and the national election studies. Political Analysis, 8(4), 389–398.CrossRef
Campbell, A. L. (2003). How policies make citizens: Senior political activism and the American welfare state. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.CrossRef
Campbell, A. L. (2012). Policy makes mass politics. Annual Review of Political Science, 15, 333–351.CrossRef
Chamberlain, G. (1980). Analysis of covariance with qualitative data. Review of Economic Studies, 47(1), 225–238.CrossRef
Clinton, J. D., & Sances, M. W. (2018). The politics of policy: The initial mass political effects of medicaid expansion in the states. American Political Science Review, 112(1), 167–185.CrossRef
Feigenbaum, J., Hertel-Fernandez, A., & Williamson, V. (2018). From the bar- gaining table to the ballot box: Political effects of right to work laws. Cambridge: National Bureau of Economic Research.
Hastie, T. J., & Tibshirani, R. J. (1990). Generalized additive models. New York: Chapman and Hall.
Ingram, H., & Schneider, A. (1993). Constructing citizenship: The subtle messages of policy design. In H. Ingram & S. Rathgeb (Eds.), Public policy for democracy (pp. 68–94). Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.
Lerman, A. E., & McCabe, K. T. (2017). Personal experience and public opinion: A theory and test of conditional policy feedback. The Journal of Politics, 79(2), 624–641.CrossRef
Lowi, T. J. (1964). American business, public policy, case-studies, and political theory. World Politics, 16(4), 677–715.CrossRef
Lowi, T. J. (1969). The end of liberalism: Ideology, policy, and the crisis of public authority. New York: W.W. Norton.
Mettler, S. (2005). Soldiers to citizens: The G.I. Bill and the making of the greatest generation. New York: Oxford University Press.
Pierson, P. (1993). When effect becomes cause: Policy feedback and political change. World Politics, 45(4), 595–628.CrossRef
Schattschneider, E. E. (1935). Politics, pressures, and the tariff. New York: Prentice Hall.
Soss, J. (1999). Lessons of welfare: Policy design, political learning, and political action. American Political Science Review, 93(2), 363–380.CrossRef
Weaver, V. M., & Lerman, A. E. (2010). Political consequences of the carceral state. American Political Science Review, 104(4), 817–833.CrossRef
White, A. (2019). Misdemeanor disenfranchisement? The demobilizing effects of brief jail spells on potential voters. American Political Science Review, 113(2), 311–324.CrossRef
Wilson, J. Q. (1973). Political organizations. New York: Basic Books.
Metadata
Title
The Effect of Distributive Politics on Electoral Participation: Evidence from 70 Million Agricultural Payments
Publication date
15-10-2019
Published in
Political Behavior / Issue 2/2021
Print ISSN: 0190-9320
Electronic ISSN: 1573-6687
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-019-09572-7

Other articles of this Issue 2/2021

Political Behavior 2/2021 Go to the issue

Original Paper

Intergenerational Transmission of Party Affiliation Within Political Families

Original Paper

Motivating Participation Through Political Ads: Comparing the Effects of Physiology and Self-reported Emotion

Original Paper

The Impact of the Economy on Presidential Elections Throughout US History

Original Paper

Labor Unions and White Democratic Partisanship

Original Paper

Which Party Represents My Group? The Group Foundations of Partisan Choice and Polarization

Original Paper

Party Animals? Extreme Partisan Polarization and Dehumanization