Agency Problems in Political Campaigns: Media Buying and Consulting

نویسنده

  • Gregory J. Martin
چکیده

The vast majority of advertising expenditures in congressional campaigns are made not directly by campaigns themselves but indirectly though specialist intermediary firms. Though their revenue ultimately derives from contributions to public campaigns, these firms are privately owned and operated on a for-profit basis. Using a new dataset that includes both revenues and costs of these firms, we examine the profitability of political media consulting. We investigate both whether firms are able to extract economic rents from their intermediary position and whether firms’ pecuniary incentives cause them to make strategic recommendations that deviate from their principals’ interests. We find significant differences across the two major parties: firms working for Republican candidates charge higher prices, exert less effort, and induce less responsiveness in their clients’ advertising expenditures to electoral circumstances than do their Democratic counterparts. We connect this observation to the (left-leaning) distribution of ideology among individual consulting firm employees, arguing that these higher rents serve as an incentive to induce consultants to work against their intrinsic ideological motivations. The internal organization of firms reflects an awareness of and an attempt to mitigate this potential for conflict of interest; firms are made up of ideologically homogeneous partners, and are much more likely to work for ideologically close rather than distant clients. ∗Emory University. †Emory University.

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تاریخ انتشار 2016