James Snyder, Ph.D. - US grants

A fundamental concern to scholars who study American politics centers on how resources spent in election campaigns influence electoral outcomes. This question is of interest for at least two reasons. First, it logically precedes several important issues in democratic theory: Can parties and candidates with large amounts of money buy their way into powerful political offices? Does the need for money by those who seek office allow individuals and interest groups who control large sums of money, and who contribute to election campaigns, to wield "too much" influence on policy outcomes? Second, it is necessary to understand the role of money and other resources in election campaigns in order to predict the likely effects of various campaign finance regulations, such as campaign spending limits, contribution limits, and publicly subsidized elections. This project focuses on the resource allocation problems faced by political parties that are involved in a number of simultaneous but distinct electoral contests. Specifically, how should a party allocate its campaign resources across the various contests in order to maximize its objectives? Such problems arise naturally in legislative elections with single-member districts and first-past-the-post electoral rules, such as Canada, Great Britain, India, New Zealand and the U.S., and in U.S. presidential elections under the electoral college with the "unit- rule." The Principal Investigator treats campaign spending as a form of advertising, which increases the probability that a candidate wins the office he or she is seeking. Since only one of the candidates competing for an office can win, spending by a candidates' opponents also affects his or her probability of winning. The researcher employs a game-theoretic framework to capture this interaction. The project involves theoretical and empirical components. In the theoretical work, the researcher will analyze several different models of campaign resource allocation. The models vary in 1) the number of competing parties, 2) the objective functions of the various parties, 3) certain details of the "electoral production function" (i.e., how campaign resources are translated into votes), such as the differences between incumbents and challengers, and 4) whether the world is treated in a rather static fashion, with a single election (or, alternatively, parties are extremely "myopic," concerned only with the current election), or in a more dynamic fashion, with a sequence of elections in which the outcome of one election may affect the outcomes of future elections. In the empirical work, the researcher tests the various models on data for the Canadian general elections of 1979, 1980, and 1984. Then, using the best of these models, he estimates the effects of campaign spending, incumbency, and so on, on the election outcomes, using the appropriate formulas. Besides adding to the stock of knowledge about specific issues in elections and campaign finance, this research is novel in that it uses game-theory to guide very closely the specification of empirical tests. In fact, there have been very few attempts to test game-theoretic models empirically, and to treat carefully the econometric problems involved in identifying and estimating these models.

It is widely believed that many contributions to political campaigns view their contributions as a kind of investment, expecting some private benefit in return for their money. This benefit might be a special tax reduction, a profitable contract to provide some goods or services to the government, or perhaps an official position. The benefit need not be forthcoming or even precisely defined at the time the contribution is made. Rather, the contributor may simply expect that , sometime in the future, the recipient will be able and willing to provide some desired service. This project continues the development of a model of campaign funds in which the market for political "favors" is treated as an asset market. This model captures many of the essential features one would expect of a market for quid pro quo contributions, and yields a number of interesting and strong hypotheses which are empirically testable about the pattern of contributions across elections. The extensions that are being developed for the current project include: (1) detailed investigation of races with incumbents, (2) explicit consideration of the dynamics involved in reaching an equilibrium, (3) allowing contributors to supply votes as well as money in exchange for political favors, and (5) modelling small, individual contributors, perhaps treating their contributions as a kind of consumer good. Empirical tests involve data on campaigns for the U.S. Congress and the California Legislature. Campaign-financing issues are under continuous public policy debate. A better understanding of the campaign-financing process is essential for the construction of sensible public policy.

Understanding the relative importance of various influences on the behavior of elected representives is one of the central concerns of modern political-economy. Among the possible influences are the representative's constituency, campaign contributions and lobbying efforts by special interest groups, the representative's own preferences, and pressures from various party and nonparty leaders, such as the president and committee chairmen. Although aggregated vote data are often used to measure citizens' preferences in empirical studies of representation, and are also analyzed in studies of direct democracy, there has been little work carefully linking the statistical models to well-defined models of voter choice. As a result, the behavioral assumptions underlying these empirical studies are often vague. This is especially problematic for analyses of voting data, because of past work showing that many widely used statistical techniques are probably inconsistent with certain reasonable models of voter behavior. The contribution of the project comes from developing a framework for the statistical analysis of aggregated vote data of the sort that researchers often encounter in the study of ballot propositions and candidate elections, that is based on the standard spatial voting model. The framework is applied in a number of empirical studies of voting data on ballot propositions in California and other states over various periods since 1892. These studies utilize not only voting data on ballot propositions, but also demographic information, data on voting in presidential, gubernatorial and other elections, and data on roll-call voting in state legislatures and the U.S. Congress. One particularly important issue is the extent to which elected representatives act in the interest of a majority of their constituents.

9361314 Snyder The principal investigator proposes an experimental program to measure the effect on a laser diode's frequency of optical feedback from a short cavity made from high-performance cylindrical microlens collimators. The microlens assembly, which circularizes and collimates the diode output radiation to a diffraction limited beam, will also provide highly efficient optical feedback into the laser cavity. From the results of these experiments we will design a simple, low cost, compact, and robust tunable diode laser system that utilizes collimating microlenses to form a short external cavity for both longitudinal mode control and frequency tuning. ***