Abstract
Political action committees (PACs), especially those controlled by organized labor and business, have been shown to affect Congressional voting. We explore how PACs influenced the House of Representatives’ vote on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The NAFTA vote is analyzed because organized labor strongly opposed the treaty while business generally supported it and because of the straight-forward voting generated by its fast-track status. Probit analysis of a unique, unpublished data set containing information about PAC and non-PAC contributions to the 1992 House election campaigns demonstrates that Representatives who depended largely on labor PACs tended to oppose NAFTA, while Representatives who derived a large proportion of their campaign contributions from business PACs tended to favor its passage.
Article PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.
References
Chappell, Henry W. “Campaign Contributions and Voting on the Cargo Preference Bill.”Public Choice 36 (1981): 301–12.
——— “Campaign Contributions and Congressional Voting: A Simultaneous Probit-Tobit Model.”Review of Economics and Statistics 64 (February 1982): 77–83.
Coughlin, Cletus C. “Domestic Content Legislation: House Voting and the Economic Theory of Regulation.”Economic Inquiry 20 (October, 1985): 437–48.
Endersby, James W., and Michael C. Munger. “The Impact of Legislator Attributes on Union PAC Campaign Contributions.”Journal of Labor Research 13 (Winter 1992): 79–97.
Frendreis, John P., and Richard W. Waterman. “PAC Contributions and Legislative Behavior: Senate Voting on Trucking Deregulation.”Social Science Quarterly 66 (June 1985): 401–12.
Kau, James B., Donald Keenan, and Paul H. Rubin. “A General Equilibrium Model of Congressional Voting.”Quarterly Journal of Economics 97 (May 1982): 271–94.
Kau, James B., and Paul H. Rubin. “Voting on Minimum Wages: A Time Series Analysis.”Journal of Political Economy 86 (April 1978): 337–42.
———. “Self-interest, Ideology, and Logrolling in Congressional Voting.”Journal of Law and Economics 22 (October 1979): 365–84.
———. “The Impact of Labor Unions on the Passage of Economic Legislation.”Journal of Labor Research 2 (Spring 1981): 133–46.
Masters, Marick F., and John Thomas Delaney. “Union Legislative Records During President Reagan’s First Term.”Journal of Labor Research 8 (Winter 1987a): 1–18.
———. “Union Political Activities: A Review of the Empirical Literature.”Industrial and Labor Relations Review 40 (April 1987b): 336–53.
Masters, Marick F., and Asghar Zardkoohi. “The Determinants of Labor PAC Allocations to Legislators.”Industrial Relations 25 (Fall 1986): 328–38.
Pohlman, Marcus, and George S. Crisci. “Support for Organized Labor in the House of Representatives: The 89th and 95th Congresses.”Political Science Quarterly 97 (Winter 1982/1983): 639–52.
Salzman, Gregory M. “Congressional Voting on Labor Issues: The Role of PACs.”Industrial and Labor Relations Review 40 (January 1987): 163–79.
Silberman, Jonathan, and Garey C. Durden. “Determining Legislative Preferences for the Minimum Wage: An Econometric Analysis.”Journal of Political Economy 84 (April 1976): 317–29.
Steagall, Jeffrey W., and Kenneth M. Jennings. “Unions and NAFTA’s Legislative Passage: Confrontation and Cover.”Journal of Labor Studies (forthcoming).
Center for Responsive Politics. Unpublished data on 1992 campaign contributions. (Washington, D.C.: CRP, 1994).
“House Votes 572, 573, 575, 576, 577, 578, 579.”Congressional Quarterly (November 20, 1993): 3224–5.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Steagall, J.W., Jennings, K. Unions, PAC contributions, and the NAFTA vote. Journal of Labor Research 17, 515–521 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02685863
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02685863