My wife was a teaching assistant for a political science professor back in her graduate school days, and he's since put up his own blog that brought my attention to this column from The Washington Post which gives an interesting perspective on the effects of special interests groups in politics. Conventional wisdom seems to say that money basically buys votes. Throw enough cash at a candidate, and you can sway the opinion of a candidate to change their mind and go your way. However, what typically happens is that groups that are ideologically in agreement with a politician's views donate money not to convince him that their proposal is right, but to move their issue up in priority so it's dealt with first:
Hall said that when special interest groups make donations or lobby the president and legislators, the pitch is never, "Here's some money to change your vote," but rather, "Here is an issue to work on that will appeal to your constituents." Politicians go along with the proposals precisely because such work does help their constituents. The only problem, of course, is that by focusing on some constituents, the politician no longer has time to focus on issues that help other constituents. Politicians may feel they are in the corner of both wealthy and poor constituents, but the money that flows into politics tends to get them to prioritize the concerns of the wealthy and the organized over those who are marginalized.
"There is a loser," Hall said. "Whatever else the legislator would be doing gets lost . . . I don't get to the 15th thing on my list, but I don't know what the 15th thing is and I don't know if I would have gotten to it anyway. There is a distortion of priorities, but there is no ethical violation."
So essentially the President or Congressmen aren't bribed in the strictest sense of the term--they were going to vote whatever way they did regardless of the money that was given to them. They just happened to give that issue more attention.
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