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Can Vendors Buy Influence? The Relationship Between Campaign Contributions and Government Contracts
Abstract
Over the past 30 years, research on government contracting has identified three major influences that help explain variation in contracting decisions—managerial, organizational, and political. This study looks to advance the political influence literature by introducing a factor that has received limited attention—vendor influence. This study specifically focuses on contract transactions at the U.S. federal government to determine if vendors influence the contract award. Traditionally, political influence is studied at the macro or meso levels. This study shifts the unit of analysis to the micro level which requires a change in measurement of political influence. The study uses vendor campaign contributions to capture political influence on this new level of focus.
... In fact, the corrupting effect of money in elections has long been debated, in particular in the US where legal battles, intensive media attention, and extensive scholarship have all provided evidence for either side of the debate (Ansolabehere, de Figueiredo, & Snyder, 2003). There is now mounting evidence that companies donating to federal election campaigns win more contracts (Bromberg, 2014), receive favourable sentences (Fulmer & Knill, 2013) or beneficial regulation (McKay, 2018). Moreover, other forms of establishing political connections between legislators and government suppliers are also said to facilitate favoured treatment such as hiring politicians and top appointees (Goldman, Rocholl, & So, 2013). ...
... It allows the company to pull the strings in diverse ways leading to preferential treatment. Hence, any donation, whether it goes to a particular race or the winning versus the losing candidate or the party holding majority or minority in Congress (Bromberg, 2014), has some degree of influence over the favoured treatment of bidding firms. For example, interviewees of Bromberg (2014) noted some instances in which, "A company who is competing will write their Senator or their Representative and will say 'Any support you can get me' and we will generally get an inquiry letter stating, 'We understand they've applied, we want to make sure you give them all the fair treatment.'" ...
... Hence, any donation, whether it goes to a particular race or the winning versus the losing candidate or the party holding majority or minority in Congress (Bromberg, 2014), has some degree of influence over the favoured treatment of bidding firms. For example, interviewees of Bromberg (2014) noted some instances in which, "A company who is competing will write their Senator or their Representative and will say 'Any support you can get me' and we will generally get an inquiry letter stating, 'We understand they've applied, we want to make sure you give them all the fair treatment.'" Such a broad, arguably rather blunt hypothesis does not preclude that the quantity of donations matters, that is a company has to be noticed by the political elite to be able to build and use connections: small connections might matter less or not at all compared to large donations. ...
The corrupting power of money in US politics has long been debated with emerging evidence pointing out that campaign contributions help funnel money to politically connected companies. However, it is yet unclear how exactly such mechanisms might work and what are the curbs on politically driven contracting. To address these gaps we compile the full dataset of published federal contracts and registered campaign contributions for 2004-2015, linked to each other on the company level. We develop corruption risk indices in government contracting which capture tendering practices and outcomes potentially characterised by favouritism. Using contract-level regression models with a wide range of fixed effects, we find that a large increase in donations going from 1 thousand USD to 1 million USD increases risks by a little over one tenth of a red flag on a 0-7 red flag scale. The effects are largely partisan, that is donating to the governing party matters the most. Moreover, company donations can influence tendering corruption risks most where the federal agency has a low baseline institutional quality: in such cases, large donations to the president's party (749,000 USD or more) add 2.6 red flags. Institutional quality, campaign contributions, and favouritism in US federal government contracting 3
... Among these, donating to election campaigns 4 in return for public procurement contracts is a corrupt exchange which is widely considered as one of the most frequently used mechanisms, and has in turn, received the highest scrutiny. It has been uncovered in diverse countries such as Czech Republic, Brazil, Italy, US, Romania, and Russia even though evidence in many cases is only suggestive and indirect (Boas, Hidalgo, & Richardson, 2014;Bromberg, 2014;Doroftei & Dimulescu, 2015;Mironov & Zhuravskaya, 2011;Počarovský, 2014). It is hardly a surprise that allocating government contracts to favoured companies is a prime method for returning campaign donations, as it accounts for large amounts of public spending, it can be easily centralised in the hands of a few, and contract award decisions enjoy a wide discretion of political office holders. ...
... The anticorruption potential of this mechanism is demonstrated by a range of empirical studies documenting the link between corporate donations and public procurement success. For example, in Brazil, companies' campaign contributions translate into additional contracts won worth 14 times more than the contributions (Boas et al., 2014), the same figure in the US is only 2.5 times (Bromberg, 2014). Unfortunately, neither of these studies could establish how much actual performance is expected in return for these contracts from suppliers making the true amount of corrupt rents earned unknown. ...
... If regulations are not implemented or only selectively implemented they are unlikely to influence corruption risks in public procurement. For example, a ban on corporate donations can be easily bypassed by organising private donations by corporations or donating to NGOs linked to parties rather than parties directly (Bromberg, 2014). In addition, looking at the whole repertoire of establishing particularistic links between private and public decision makers, political party donations can be replaced by alternative strategies such as companies hiring ex-politicians. ...
... Among these, donating to election campaigns 2 in return for public procurement contracts is a corrupt exchange which is widely considered as one of the most frequently used mechanisms, and has in turn, received the highest scrutiny. It has been uncovered in diverse countries such as Czech Republic, Brazil, Italy, US, Romania, and Russia even though evidence in many cases is only suggestive and indirect (Boas, Hidalgo, & Richardson, 2014;Bromberg, 2014;Doroftei & Dimulescu, 2015;Mironov & Zhuravskaya, 2011;Počarovský, 2014). It is hardly a surprise that allocating government contracts to favoured companies is a prime method for returning campaign donations, as it accounts for large amounts of public spending, it can be easily centralised in the hands of a few, and contract award decisions enjoy a wide discretion of political office holders. ...
... The anticorruption potential of this mechanism is demonstrated by a range of empirical studies documenting the link between corporate donations and public procurement success. For example, in Brazil, companies' campaign contributions translate into additional contracts won worth 14 times more than the contributions (Boas et al., 2014), the same figure in the US is only 2.5 times (Bromberg, 2014). Unfortunately, neither of these studies could establish how much actual performance is expected in return for these contracts from suppliers making the true amount of corrupt rents earned unknown. ...
... If regulations are not implemented or only selectively implemented they are unlikely to influence corruption risks in public procurement. For example, a ban on corporate donations can be easily bypassed by organising private donations by corporations or donating to NGOs linked to parties rather than parties directly (Bromberg, 2014). In addition, looking at the whole repertoire of establishing particularistic links between private and public decision makers, political party donations can be replaced by alternative strategies such as companies hiring ex-politicians. ...
There are widespread perceptions and countless documented cases of tight-knit networks of politicians and businessmen colluding in the allocation of public procurement contracts in return for political party donations. In the absence of systematic evidence, neither the magnitude of the problem nor the effectiveness of policies curbing such corruption is well-understood. In order to advance our understanding of these phenomena, this paper tests whether political financing regulations can contribute to controlling corruption in public procurement. We utilize aggregated official micro-level data on almost 3 million contracts awarded across twenty-nine European countries from 2009 to 2014 to measure the risk of high-level institutionalized corruption using novel proxy indicators. Legislation regulating political finances is directly measured by coding national laws from 2009 to 2014. In cross-country panel regression and difference-in-difference models, we find that introducing additional political financing restrictions does not have a measurable negative impact on public procurement corruption risks. In fact, the observed effect is positive in most models. The observed relationship remains the same for most constitutive components of political financing regulations. Several challenges remain for a conclusive judgement on political party financing regulations’ effectiveness in curbing corruption, such as measuring implementation rather than legislation, allowing for a longer lead-time for regulatory impact, or considering institutional inter-dependencies.
... Among these, donating to election campaigns 4 in return for public procurement contracts is a corrupt exchange which is widely considered as one of the most frequently used mechanisms, and has in turn, received the highest scrutiny. It has been uncovered in diverse countries such as Czech Republic, Brazil, Italy, US, Romania, and Russia even though evidence in many cases is only suggestive and indirect (Boas, Hidalgo, & Richardson, 2014;Bromberg, 2014;Doroftei & Dimulescu, 2015;Mironov & Zhuravskaya, 2011;Počarovský, 2014). It is hardly a surprise that allocating government contracts to favoured companies is a prime method for returning campaign donations, as it accounts for large amounts of public spending, it can be easily centralised in the hands of a few, and contract award decisions enjoy a wide discretion of political office holders. ...
... The anticorruption potential of this mechanism is demonstrated by a range of empirical studies documenting the link between corporate donations and public procurement success. For example, in Brazil, companies' campaign contributions translate into additional contracts won worth 14 times more than the contributions (Boas et al., 2014), the same figure in the US is only 2.5 times (Bromberg, 2014). Unfortunately, neither of these studies could establish how much actual performance is expected in return for these contracts from suppliers making the true amount of corrupt rents earned unknown. ...
... If regulations are not implemented or only selectively implemented they are unlikely to influence corruption risks in public procurement. For example, a ban on corporate donations can be easily bypassed by organising private donations by corporations or donating to NGOs linked to parties rather than parties directly (Bromberg, 2014). In addition, looking at the whole repertoire of establishing particularistic links between private and public decision makers, political party donations can be replaced by alternative strategies such as companies hiring ex-politicians. ...
... • brokers and intermediary organisations establishing personal links (Rajwani&Liedong, 2015). • simultaneously holding public and private offices (Etzioni, 2009), • political party and campaign contributions (Boas et al., 2014;Bromberg, 2014;Fazekas et al., 2022;OECD, 2017;Witko, 2013), and • lobbying (Dávid-Barrett, 2011). ...
... For example, in public procurement, many studies look at the amount of contracts won due to connections while others link contracting processes and administrative structures to the presence of connections (Fazekas et al., 2022). For example, in Brazil, suppliers' political contributions result in additional contracts won worth 14 times more than the contributions (Boas et al., 2014), the same ratio in the US is only 2.5 times (Bromberg, 2014). Moreover, in the US, the strongest predictor of company contract volume from before to after the 1994 government change is the party to which the company was connected (Goldman et al., 2013). ...
Measuring corruption is indispensable for identifying effective anticorruption policies and tracking progress towards lower levels of corruption. While there is a widespread perception that researchers and policymakers lack adequate quantitative corruption indicators, we argue that in fact there is an abundance of such metrics, although gaps remain. Tried-and-tested indicators range from expert ratings through national representative bribery surveys until transaction-based proxy indicators such as public procurement risk indicators. However, the diversity of measurement instruments and corrupt behaviours tracked creates new challenges: selecting indicators congruent with research and policy objectives, and combining different indicators into a coherent assessment (e.g. composite scores). This article reviews a series of state-of-the-art indicators and provides guidance to researchers and policymakers in selecting indicators appropriate to diverse use-cases.
... We know that compared to non-donating firms, donating firms receive more favourable sentences when facing legal issues (Fulmer and Knill 2013) and have significant influence on legislation (McKay 2018). There is mounting evidence that companies donating to federal election campaigns win more contracts (Witko 2011;Bromberg 2014). What is still unclear are the mechanisms by which politicians might influence the procurement process in favor of donors, given the key role independent bureaucrats play in the process. ...
... Particularly in the highly fragmented US political system, even politicians from the minority party can influence spending decisions of key committees and have contacts and pressure points on the federal bureaucracy. Hence, any donation, whether going to a particular race for the presidency or Congress, or to the party holding majority or minority in Congress has some degree of influence over the favoured treatment of bidding firms (Bromberg 2014). For example, interviewees of Bromberg (2014) noted instances in which, "A company who is competing will write their Senator or their Representative and will say "Any support you can get me" and we will generally get an inquiry letter stating, "We understand they've applied, we want to make sure you give them all the fair treatment."" ...
The impacts of money in US politics have long been debated. Building on principal-agent models, we test whether and to what degree companies’ political donations lead to their favoured treatment in federal procurement. We expect the impact of donations on favouritism to vary by the strength of control by political principals over their bureaucratic agents. We compile a comprehensive dataset of published federal contracts and registered campaign contributions for 2004-2015. We develop risk indices capturing tendering practices and outcomes likely characterised by favouritism. Using fixed effects regressions, matching, and regression discontinuity analyses, we find confirming evidence for our theory. A large increase in donations from 10,000 USD to 5 million USD increases favouritism risks by about 1/4th standard deviation. These effects are largely partisan, with firms donating to the party that holds the presidency showing higher risk. Donations influence favouritism risks most in less independent agencies: the same donation increases the risk of favouritism by an additional 1/3rd standard deviation in agencies least insulated from politics. Exploiting sign-off thresholds, we demonstrate that donating contractors are subject to less scrutiny by political appointees.
... Electing a donor-funded politician increases the influence of contributions in politics and the likelihood of public procurement corruption on the local level (Ruiz 2018). The literature overwhelmingly suggests that donors receive a "price premium" in their contracts (Arvate, Barbosa, and Fuzitani 2013;Baltrunaite 2020;Boas, Hidalgo, and Richardson 2014;Bromberg 2014;Ruiz 2018;Witko 2011), and forbidding corporate campaign donations reduces the likelihood of large donors receiving contracts (Baltrunaite 2020). Seemingly, the privileged mechanism to awarding contracts to donors is leaking tendering information to bidders to see their stances improved. ...
... Theoretical and practical implications follow these findings. Theoretically, this research supports the notion that quantifying the relationship between campaign finance and corruption risks could be more nuanced on the local level (Baltrunaite 2020;Bromberg 2014), more so in small municipalities. The study challenges the notion that corruption on the local level might be contained when constituents get closer to their representatives and, therefore, might hold the former accountable more easily. ...
Conventional wisdom holds that large sums of money poured into election campaigns are the gateway to corruption. Allegations of the corrupting influence of money in politics and policy are widespread on the national level. Yet, little empirical evidence has advanced the understanding of such a link on the local level, coupled with blurred corruption measures. This master’s thesis tests the effect of campaign finance on public procurement corruption risks in Colombian municipalities, focusing on donations, small donations, and financial disclosure. To that end, I seized publicly disclosed contribution-level data from the 2015 municipal elections and a novel index of institutionalized public procurement corruption risks based upon contract-level data from the near population of local governments. The analysis shows that donations are negatively associated with overall corruption risk, yet they affect specific corruption risks differently. By contrast, small donations seem to correlate positively with direct awarding for a sub-sample of medium-sized municipalities, whereas in their large-sized counterparts the effect of the former on institutionalized corruption is adverse. Finally, financial misreporting is positively linked with market competition restrictions and direct awarding. In the conclusion, I discuss the implications of these findings for future research and outline a series of policy recommendations.
... However, access is generally a precondition for exerting influence over public policy. Depending on the parameters of the research, most studies find some impact of private money on regulatory outcomes (de Figueiredo Jr and Edwards, 2007;Claessens, Feijen and Laeven, 2008;Witko, 2011;Bromberg, 2014). Research from the US shows that governments' decisions typically align with elite preferences, rather than the broad public interest. ...
We recently published a comprehensive report on political party funding in Aotearoa New Zealand (Rashbrooke and Marriott, 2022). This article documents some of the issues we discovered in the process of writing that report and some of the solutions we propose to address these issues. We recommend stronger donation regulation: capping annual donations at $15,000 and donor identification for donations above $1,500. We also recommend increased state funding: for approximately $2 per voter per annum, ‘big money’ can be eliminated from the political finance arena. This improves transparency and – crucially – can significantly reduce the perception of influence from large donations.
... Political party financing has also been linked to suspected corruption and distorted spending structure in public procurement in a range of contexts such as Brazil where companies' campaign contributions translate 7 into additional contracts won worth 14 times more than the contributions (Boas et al., 2014), or the US where the same figure is only 2.5 times (Bromberg, 2014). Unfortunately, neither of these studies could establish how much actual performance is expected in return for these contracts from suppliers making the true amount of corrupt rents earned unknown. ...
Considering that about 15 percent of global gross domestic product flows through public procurement systems, the lack of systematic evidence on what works in this field is a major challenge for effective policy making. Hence, this paper systematically reviews the state of the evidence on major public procurement reforms and their impact on value for money and open access to public tenders. It discusses the reliably identified costs and benefits and systematically evaluates the quality of the evidence base, relying on academic and policy literature. The quality of evidence on the impact of public procurement interventions is mediocre, with reliable evidence established in multiple countries using diverse analytical methods only for selective, typically narrow tools. Although there is a range of policy tools with global policy interest and extensive implementation record, these have received little to no evaluation. As high-quality research uses different outcome measures, comparing intervention effectiveness is only possible for a very narrow outcome: savings. Comparing intervention types according to their effects on savings, centralized procurement and framework agreements stand out with the largest effects, over 50 percent. Most other intervention types were documented to achieve about 5-10 percent price savings if they were well implemented. Given the estimated US$11 trillion spent on procurement annually around the world, even savings of 1 percent amounts to US$110 billion annually. This systematic review points out that research on e-procurement and its variants, transparency portals, civil society supervision, and opening up the black box of public management, among others, would deserve considerably more research going forward.
... [106][107][108] Still, rules and processes limiting administrative discretion may help reduce biases and limit unwarranted political influence on the selection of contractors. [109][110][111] This is especially important for procurement, where tools such as indefinite delivery vehicles, simplified acquisition procedures, and sole source contracting can both create and constrain discretion. Public agencies should establish business relationships with disadvantaged partners prior to disasters, promote leaders that demonstrate a commitment to equity and accountability, use rules and processes to promote fair and transparent vendor selection during emergencies, and clearly identify a beginning and an end to the use of emergency procurement authorities. ...
The rapid global transmission of COVID-19 has demonstrated many weaknesses in government procurement of essential supplies. In the United States, these problems have been particularly evident, as systemic fragmentation through federalism has frustrated a coordinated response. Rather than working together, states and localities are competing over limited medical resources, while the federal government has not stepped in to alleviate burdens on the lower tiers of government. In this study, we introduce how procurement is managed under normal circumstances and how it changes during emergencies. Easing procurement rules comes with necessary tradeoffs, particularly involving equity and accountability. Using case studies from recent disasters, we identify procurement and management recommendations for the COVID-19 response and future emergencies. We conclude that public procurement is integral to effective management in the 21st century and must be treated as such in the study and practice of public administration and emergency management.
... Most studies look at individual countries with only partially comparable research questions, data, and analytical tools. For example, in Brazil, companies' campaign contributions translate into additional contracts won worth 14 times more than the contributions (Boas, Hidalgo, and Richardson 2014), the same figure in the US is only 2.5 times (Bromberg 2014). Moreover, in the US the largest predictor of company procurement volume from before to after the 1994 change in the controlling majority of the House and the Senate is to which party the company was connected to (Goldman, Rocholl, and So 2013). ...
... Most studies looked at individual countries with only partially comparable research questions, data, and analytical tools . For example, in Brazil, companies' campaign contributions translate into additional contract won worth 14 times more than the contributions (Boas, Hidalgo, & Richardson, 2014), the same figure in the US is only 2 .5 times (Bromberg, 2014) . Moreover, in the US the largest predictor of company procurement volume from before to after the 1994 change in the controlling majority of the House and the Senate is the party connection of the publicly listed company (Goldman et al ., 2013) . ...
... Most studies look at individual countries with only partially comparable research questions, data, and analytical tools. For example, in Brazil, companies' campaign contributions translate into additional contracts won worth fourteen times more than the contributions (Boas, Hidalgo, and Richardson 2014), the same figure in the United States is only two and a half times (Bromberg 2014). Moreover, in the US, which political party a company was connected to is the largest predictor of company procurement volume from before to after the 1994 change in control of the House and Senate (Goldman, Rocholl, and So 2013). ...
... Most studies look at individual countries with only partially comparable research questions, data, and analytical tools. For example, in Brazil, companies' campaign contributions translate into additional contracts won worth 14 times more than the contributions (Boas, Hidalgo, and Richardson 2014), the same figure in the US is only 2.5 times (Bromberg 2014). Moreover, in the US the largest predictor of company procurement volume from before to after the 1994 change in the controlling majority of the House and the Senate is to which party the company was connected to (Goldman, Rocholl, and So 2013). ...
... Most studies looked at individual countries with only partially comparable research questions, data, and analytical tools . For example, in Brazil, companies' campaign contributions translate into additional contract won worth 14 times more than the contributions (Boas, Hidalgo, & Richardson, 2014), the same figure in the US is only 2 .5 times (Bromberg, 2014) . Moreover, in the US the largest predictor of company procurement volume from before to after the 1994 change in the controlling majority of the House and the Senate is the party connection of the publicly listed company (Goldman et al ., 2013) . ...
This article explores tax credits for political party funding in Aotearoa New Zealand (NZ). Participation in the democratic process is low and declining in NZ, as political party membership drops and parties increasingly focus their attention on small numbers of large donors. Advantages of tax credits include incentivising parties to engage with society to attract donations, encouraging individuals to participate in the democratic process and potentially providing greater financial support to parties. The primary disadvantage is that tax credits require at least a small financial contribution from a donor, which will not be possible for everyone. For a relatively low cost of approximately NZ$2.35 per voter, large donations could be eliminated from the NZ political funding system, along with the concomitant potential for undue influence. Using the Canadian model for comparison, a similar system in NZ may result in greater public political engagement and better funded political parties.
Political theorists and legal scholars have long regarded the practice of reason-giving as core to democratic and legal enterprises. Democratic theorists, for instance, contend that public reason-giving is essential to the deliberative process through which we form a self-regulating political community, constraining debate and public actions to be relatively other-regarding. If this claim is right, in theory reason-giving should reduce the incentives to engage in rent-seeking. Here, I establish this relationship conceptually and examine it empirically by studying a unique reform to reason-giving requirements in federal procurement. I find that requiring public officials to offer reasons for their actions is associated with less overall rent-seeking, as measured by campaign contributions—decreasing both the amount of money contributed to campaigns as well as the apparent sophistication of campaign contribution strategies.KeywordsReason-givingSelf-regulationRent-seekingPublic officialsFederal procurementCampaign contributions
Public procurement represents a significant part of the global economy and influencesthe nature and quality of public goods and services. Consequently, it has substantial direct and indirectlinks with the human rights of a wide array of rightsholders. However, public procurement systemsrarely reflect these links and remain resistant to calls on human rights integration from internationalorganizations and academic scholarship. While this divergence is often discussed, the root governance issues that create the gap between public procurement and human rights and contribute to the lackof progress remain relatively unexplored. This paper investigates a prevalent governance issue inpublic procurement – political favouritist corruption schemes – and their role in the paradoxical lackof progress in aligning public procurement systems with human rights requirements. Through theanalysis of primary and secondary sources, the paper demonstrates the links between such corruptpractices and prevalent human rights issues in public procurement. It argues that by underminingpublic procurement systems, political favouritism jeopardizes primary economic and secondarysocial objectives of procurement and brings about adverse human rights impacts. These impactsharm civil and political, as well as economic, social and cultural human rights in national contextsand obstruct the development at large. Moreover, this corrupt arrangement represents a roadblockfor promoting human rights integration in public procurement and, hence, hampers the progressfor the novel approach of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights in general, andits provisions concerning the state-business nexus in particular. The paper concludes by outliningthe need for further interdisciplinary and empirical research which will explore this issue throughthe lens of business and human rights, and offer a systemic analysis of root causes, the state of playand potential solutions.
This study examines insider lobbying as a form of relational Corporate Political Activity (CPA) that can be used by firms to gain an advantage in the competition for government contracts, and how firm size moderates the effectiveness of different insider lobbying strategies. Drawing on a unique dataset that captures meetings between private companies and British government ministers, we find that both the breadth and depth of insider lobbying are positively related to the value of the contracts awarded by the UK Ministry of Defence. Further analysis reveals that the benefits from a strategy of lobbying depth are stronger for small firms, than those from a strategy of lobbying breadth. The findings suggest that the bridging and bonding social capital cultivated through meetings with politicians can be deployed in alternative ways by different-sized firms.
Progress in corruption research and anticorruption policies has been hampered by the lack of adequate measurement in at least two ways. On the one hand, shortcomings of corruption measurement limits our capacity to understand what works and hence develop effective policies. On the other hand, in the absence of sufficiently sensitive measures of corruption frequency and distribution, we simply cannot know whether we are making progress or not. To address these interrelated pressing problems, this article reviews a wide array of corruption measurement instruments across diverse disciplines and offers a balanced assessment of their quality and outlines where to deploy which instrument. It also compiles a comprehensive state-of-the-art repository of data on corruption measurement largely missing from the literature.
Methods reviewed fall broadly in the following categories:
• expert scores such as the V-Dem corruption indices.
• population surveys, perception as well as self-reported experience-based such as Transparency International’s Bribe Payers Index;
• national context indicators such as the Index of Public Integrity,
• micro-level enforcement-based indicators such as criminal statistics in the US),
• micro-level transactions-based indicators in
o companies such as indicators of ownership networks,
o public procurement such as measures of limited competition,
o public sector employment such as surveys of civil service hiring, and
o personal connections such as measures of revolving door.
The review will put a particularly strong emphasis on more recent innovations in corruption measurement, most of which fall in the micro-level transaction-based indices category. These indicators constitute a diverse group of corruption indices with the common trait that they all measure corruption on the level of economic transactions where corruption actually takes place. Furthermore, these indicators invariably resort to proxying corruption rather than measuring it directly which means that they have to rely on theory and statistical evidence to underpin their validity. As corruption can manifest itself in a range of economic and political transactions these indicators are quite different from each other looking at, for example, welfare payments, government contracts, payments and donations, public officials’ asset declarations, or law making.
While transaction-level measurements hold the promise of greater detail and sensitivity to change, they are often plagued by false positives, that is signalling corruption where there is none. Hence a careful approach is needed when using proxy measures. For example, indicators of revolving door or corporate political connections are widely used and all too often uncritically. However, contrary to the dominant corruption risk interpretation of public officials working in the private sector and having strong ties between public and private entities also carry a host of benefits such as improved information flows between sectors and the spread of entrepreneurial values to the public sector to name a few. Hence, it is only the misuse of connections which poses risks which requires the measurement of the impacts not only the existence of a particularistic link. For example, in public procurement, most studies look at the amount of contracts won due to connections with only some trying to also link to corrupt means of obtaining contracts enabled by connections.
In spite of the widely held views that there is a paucity of indicators overall, this broad review finds that the field is diverse, advanced in many respects, and highly specialised. Unfortunately, different literatures and results are largely disconnected from each other, hampering cumulative knowledge generation. Given this surprising abundance of measurement instruments, this review offers a carefully crafted guide as to which measurement instrument is best suited to which research or policy problem. Such a guide is greatly needed also because many of the different indicators actually measure a different corrupt phenomenon and they are often uncorrelated across and within countries. Crucially, researchers and policy makers have to precisely define the kind of corruption they are interested in and the level of precision they need for deriving useful and actionable insights (e.g. targeting audits requires a lot higher degree of precision than guiding high-level policy interventions).
The review article concludes with an agenda for future research which both enriches the measurement landscape by addressing notable gaps, while also outlining ways of using different measurement instruments in tandem. In particular, it is proposed that a successful future agenda shall develop new corruption indicators which
• rest on a theoretically sound understanding of the corruption process,
• derive from objective data describing actor behaviour,
• are defined on the micro level such as individual transactions, and
• allow for consistent comparisons across countries, organisations, and time.
Medicaid reform, which has been central to state government reform throughout the United States, represents conceptual and implementation challenges for practitioners and scholars. This article investigates one such reform, in Kansas, where the state contracted with nonprofit agencies for Medicaid case management services. We examine policy rationales for this social service reform in light of the actual economic and management environments. We offer a typology of contract management complexity which articulates how structural factors affect contract management challenges; it indicates that this social service reform presents substantially greater complexity than more traditional service contracting. Our analysis shows that key aspects of the market model of contracting are absent in this reform, reflecting a gap between the political rhetoric which surrounds the reform and the reality of the contracting experience. The lack of market conditions to impose discipline on contractors raises questions about contract management capacity and administrative accountability. The level of management complexity suggests the need for well trained contract management staff and especially sensitive accountability structures to facilitate contract monitoring and minimize principal-agent complications.
This article presents an empirical analysis of the National Labor Relations Board, focusing on the balance the agency strikes between the interests of business and labor. It is oriented by a theoretical framework that, relative to popular models, takes a broader view of the causal structure of regulatory performance--one that simultaneously allows for presidents, congressional committees, the courts, agency staff, constituents, and economic conditions. The empirical results are instructive. All of these factors prove to have significant impacts on NLRB decisions. In addition, the core regulatory actors--Board members, staff, and constituents--are shown to engage in mutually adaptive adjustment: each is responsive to the decisions of each of the others, and their reciprocal relationships impart equilibrating properties to the system as a whole. Thus, the evidence points to a varied set of important determinants and to the dynamic nature of their interconnection. To the extent that these findings are at all characteristic of other regulatory agencies, simple popular models of regulation are likely to give anemic explanations, if not highly distorted accounts, of why agencies behave as they do.
It is clear that corporations seek to use campaign contributions to gain government contracts, but despite anecdotes, whether they succeed has been largely ignored in academic studies. In this article, I discuss how campaign contributions may influence contracting and consider the relationship between the donation of campaign contributions and the receipt of government contracts for a sample of firms politically active between 1979 and 2006. The analysis shows that even after controlling for past contracts and other factors, companies that contributed more money to federal candidates subsequently received more contracts. In the conclusion, I discuss the implications of this finding for future research and for reforming the contracting process. The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, Inc. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]
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Stability and responsiveness are features of bureaucracy that affect both policy success and policy consistency with dynamic public values. This article explores the stability and responsiveness of a bureaucracy which, according to normative theory, should be less responsive to political stimuli, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Measures are constructed across time of political support for commission policies, as well as agency outputs and their effect on the client community. Linear time series regression methods are then applied in quantifying changes through time in policy implementation and their consistency with the ideology of incumbent political administrations. The findings demonstrate that equal employment opportunity policy is unstable, undergoing frequent transformations in response to changing political conditions.
Relational contracting or collaborative governance has come to the forefront of scholarly studies of government privatization
efforts. The concept of trust (between contracting governments and their vendors) is rising in importance as one of the central
tenets of this type of governance. What is largely understudied in the midst of this increasing attention to the topic is
identifying how and under what conditions trust is formed and sustained. Borrowing from economic, organizational, sociological,
and management theories, we develop competing hypotheses to examine what determines the extent of trust contracting governments
display toward their service providers. Our findings suggest that local governments tend to place more confidence in their
vendors’ faithfulness and honesty when their contracting partners are from the same sector (i.e., other governmental units),
had known reputations prior to the relationship, have strong community ties, and perform their tasks well. Interestingly,
several economic theory-based explanations—rational choice and game theory, social exchange theory, and transaction cost economics—find
only limited support.
President Carter will perhaps be remembered most for his perceived incompetence, an impression produced largely by his inability to forge coalitions in Congress, and by his failure as an ‘outsider’ to intervene effectively in the established policy-making processes in Washington. In his farewell address, Carter alluded to what he believed to be the source of his troubles – the fragmentation of power and decision-making exploited by influential special interests. Carter believed that he was trapped in a web of organized groups allied with well-placed congressional and bureaucratic sympathizers seeking to protect their narrowly defined interests and frustrating his own broader vision of the public good.
This article examines the determinants of contracting out among cities in the United States. A precondition to contracting out is the expected realization of the cost savings from external production as a result of scale economies and/or increased competition in the supply of public services. Yet, whether or not a city chooses external production depends on the fiscal pressures within the city and the political impediments. This model of the decision to contract out is examined using a sample of 433 cities. The percentage of publicly provided services that are externally produced is found to increase with (1) greater cost savings, (2) more stringent fiscal conditions, and (3) less powerful public service constituency groups.
Theory tells us that competition is the chief driver of improved efficiency and effectiveness in government contracting, yet contract provider markets are often noncompetitive. This study offers a detailed, contextualized examination of public administrative responses to thin contract markets. Following an inductive approach with data from semistructured interviews with contract administrators, the authors offer a preliminary typology of the conditions that give rise to thin markets, and the “market management” strategies used to create, enhance, and sustain competition in the markets from where governments purchase goods and services. The authors then review the efficacy and implications of these strategies for public services to citizens.
Prior research linking public-private contracts with political donations has not examined the dynamics of exchange. Evaluating data from Wisconsin, I test for a temporal association between the awarding of public-private construction contracts and political donations by construction firm owners and executives. My findings indicate that donation activity peaks near the months when contracts are approved; that contract-related donation premiums are comparable in magnitude to election cycle premiums; and that political giving varies across three separate procurement processes. I deduce that patterns of political giving reflect strategic expenditures during the negotiation phase of the public-private procurement process. These findings have implications for campaign finance reform and privatization policy.
During the previous two decades, researchers have conducted an array of empirical studies of local government contracting for services. Some of the more recent findings have suggested that this form of privatization has become less politically controversial and more accepted as a service delivery approach. Do politics still matter when it comes to explaining patterns in local government contracting? The findings from this study indicate that the influence of political factors, such as demand for smaller government and public employee opposition to privatization, still help to account for variations in local government contracting, as they did during the 1980s and early 1990s. Contract management capacity is an important determinant of local government contracting.
Public administration writers, with some notable exceptions, generally have not paid a great deal of attention to the history of ideas. However, public administration inquiry is profoundly affected by longstanding political and social ideas. This article shows how the idea of the state as a purposive association-that is to say, a collective enterprise that is driven by some set of substantive ends or purposes-has helped to shape the thinking and discourse of some public administration writers, particularly those of the reinventing government movement. The implications of this for public administration inquiry and education are examined.
This analysis assesses the impact of the Reagan presidency on the antitrust policy of the Department of Justice. Explanations of policy change generated by the principal-agent and bureaucratic politics perspectives are tested using an interrupted time series model. The analysis reveals that the enforcement record of the 1980s did not reflect presidential or congressional politics but was the product of changes within the bureaucracy initiated well before the advent of the 1980 elections.
Current trends in the U.S. political system threaten an increase in patronage and a return to the political problems of the 1800s. Modern-day patronage is strongly related to two popular efforts to reform government: the rollback of the civil service system and the privatization of government services. These reforms, aimed at reducing the negative outcomes of bureaucracy, have had the unfortunate outcome of eliminating policies designed to protect civil servants from patronage politics and thus of ultimately reducing democratic accountability. Whether the main cause is forgetfulness about the past or simply the application of misguided principles, the dismantling of the civil service and increasing reliance on private contractors can endanger public values and the ability to engage in a thoughtful debate about public values. Professionalism in government—including civil service, open competition for jobs and contracts, and merit systems—remains the most effective and just means for combating patronage and identifying talented, dedicated public servants and contractors.
This research extends and refines the contracting model recently offered by Ferris (1986). The determinants of contracting out among U.S. cities are examined across service providers (for-profit, nonprofit, and intergovernmental) and by functional area (public works, public safety, health and human services, parks and recreation, and support services). Findings support Ferris' thesis that contracting increases with (1) greater cost savings; (2) more stringent fiscal conditions; and (3) less powerful public service constituency groups. But, variations in his basic model emerge when municipal contracting behavior is analyzed by type of supplier and by functional category.
Do the interests represented on advisory committees to federal agencies reflect the interests that participate in the congressional debate over the agencies' programs? We address this question by analyzing data on the nomination and selection of members for the National Drinking Water Advisory Council (NDWAC) in 1995-1997. We conclude that NDWAC was composed of a balanced set of stakeholders that reflects the set of interests active in the legislative debate on drinking water in 1996. EPA selection was oriented toward candidates supported by interest groups representing environmentalists, state and local regulators, and water utilities of different types. We hypothesize that advisory committee memberships will generally mirror congressional interests whenever organized interests actively lobby for membership on the committees.
Over the last two decades institutional critics have increasingly charged that moneyed interests dominate the legislative process in Congress. Systematic research on campaign contributions and members' floor voting, however, provides little supporting evidence. We develop a view of the member-donor relationship that questions the theoretical underpinnings of the vote-buying hypothesis itself and suggests two alternative claims: (1) the effects of group expenditures are more likely to appear in committee than on the floor; and (2) the behavior most likely to be affected is members' legislative involvement, not their votes. In order to test this account, we specify a model of committee participation and estimate it using data from three House committees. In contrast to the substantial literature on contributions and roll calls, our analysis provides solid support for the importance of moneyed interests in the legislative process. We also find evidence that members are more responsive to organized business interests within their districts than to unorganized voters even when voters have strong preferences and the issue at stake is salient. Such findings suggest several important implications for our understanding of political money, interest groups, and the representativeness of legislative deliberations.
In this article, the political environment of privatization and its impact on public management are examined in the context of the privatization of a state park in Georgia. The study specifically focuses on the actions of public managers in the privatization formulation and implementation stage. Public management capacity actually increased as a result of privatization. This is an outcome quite different from those reported by public management studies of other privatized services. Applying a principal-agent framework, this study yielded several lessons that may strengthen public managers’capacity to act as “smart buyers” of goods and services and to enforce accountability when managing contractual relationships. This study links theory to practice using a case study that allows a careful examination of the strategic responses of public managers confronted by largely political, as opposed to economic, pressures to privatize an already successful state park.
This paper pursues a better understanding of regulatory independence by investigating the link between presidential administration and the performance of the independent regulatory commissions. The data are drawn from three independent commissions--the National Labor Relations Board, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Securities and Exchange Commission--and separate time-series analyses are conducted for periods covering the Truman years through 1977. Attention centers on whether and how the prevailing patterns of regulatory performance have been altered as different administrations have assumed formal charge of the government. The analysis suggests that regulatory behavior does shift across administrations, and that it varies systematically with presidential partisanship. Presidents apparently do achieve a measure of direction and control over the independent commissions.
An important decision confronting public managers is choosing when to contract for service delivery. We focus on two service characteristics that transaction cost theory suggests may influence the chances of contract success. Asset specificity is the extent to which resources applied to delivering a service can be applied to other services and ease of measurement is the extent to which the quality and quantity of service outcomes and outputs can be easily gauged. Drawing on a survey of public managers' perceptions of these dimensions for sixty-four common municipal services, we review previous studies of contracting to investigate how these two transaction costs factors influence governments' decisions about whether to contract, how to manage contracts, and when contracting is likely to be successful. Our survey and review sheds light on how public managers should manage contracting and how scholars should further investigate this important subject.
Exploring the factors that explain the choice of governance structures in interfirm alliances, this study challenges the use of a singular emphasis on transaction costs. Such an approach erroneously treats each transaction as independent and ignores the role of interfirm trust that emerges from repeated alliances between the same partners. Comprehensive multiindustry data on alliances made between 1970 and 1989 support the importance of such trust. Although support emerged for the transaction cost claim that alliances that encompass shared research and development are likely to be equity based, there is also strong evidence that repeated alliances between two partners are less likely than other alliances to be organized using equity.
We outline and test an empirical model of federal regulatory behavior that reflects the spatial (i.e., interstate) and temporal dimensions of regulation within a federal system. A pooled time-series design is used to examine the interplay of national and subnational influences on the oversight decisions of officials at the U.S. Office of Surface Mining (OSM, Department of the Interior) during the period 1985–1989. The analysis indicates that the regulatory decisions of federal authorities at OSM reflect shifts in the nation's political climate, the freelancing efforts of individual members of Congress, and the states' political climates. Taken together, the findings suggest that national policymakers are able to direct the oversight activities of bureaucratic subordinates but are constrained in that regard by “bottom up” influences.
We test the proposition that the federal bureaucracy exhibits a “bias toward business” during notice and comment rulemaking. We analyze over 30 bureaucratic rules and almost 1,700 comments over the period of 1994 to 2001. We find that business commenters, but not nonbusiness commenters, hold important influence over the content of final rules. We also demonstrate that as the proportion of business commenters increases, so too does the influence of business interests. These findings contrast with previous empirical studies and generally suggest that notice and comment procedures have not succeeded in “democratizing” the agency policymaking process to the extent sometimes suggested in the normative rulemaking literature.
Government contracting, especially for information technology products and services, has accelerated in recent years in the United States. Drawing on the insights of privatization studies, the authors examine the economic and political rationales underpinning government decisions to contract out e-government services. This article tests the extent to which economic and political rationality influence governments’ contracting decisions using data from multiple sources: a survey conducted by National Association of State Chief Information Officers, a survey by the National Association of State Procurement Officers, the Council of State Legislatures, and macro-level state data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Important factors affecting the state-level contracting decision are population size, market size, the competitiveness of the bidding process, the professional management of contracts, the partisan composition of legislatures, and political competition. Political rationales appear to play a major role in state contracting decisions. Some arguments associated with markets and economic rationality are clearly politically motivated.
We argue that contracting opens a pathway for organized interests to lobby public managers. Using multilevel modeling techniques,
we test this proposition with data from administrative agencies in the American states. We find that interactions between
organized interests and managers increase in the presence of contracting. We then demonstrate that the influence of organized
interests over key state agency decision making is driven, in part, by whether an agency contracts out for public service
delivery. The findings suggest the presence of an alternate pathway for organized interests to access and influence government
decision makers. Moreover, these results complement previous studies, which primarily highlight the potential economic benefits
of contracting and hold important normative implications for our understanding of government responsiveness in an era of decentralized
governance.
The literature on political control of bureaucracy reveals that bureaucracies are highly responsive to political forces. This paper argues that the political control literature misses evidence from other academic literature that bears directly on this phenomenon. Specifically, researchers need to consider the values of the bureaucracy in any effort to assess the degree of political control. An empirical test is presented using a data set from public education. Results show bureaucratic values to be far more influential in explaining bureaucratic outputs and outcomes than political factors. These findings suggest that a reinterpretation of previous empirical research is urgently in order.
This essay examines the popular argument that a culture of nonpartisan objectivity within the career bureaucracy can effectively serve the interests of presidents and other political executives. A close reading of the literature reveals that neutral competence has become an ambiguous concept. Moreover, evidence drawn from recent studies of OMB (Office of Management and Budget) and from the bureaucratic politics literature more generally suggests that it may not be realistic to expect that civil servants can be nonpartisan and still satisfy the president's need for responsiveness. Although neutral competence is a highly relevant doctrine in some administrative contexts, it is difficult to reconcile with the goal of political responsiveness in areas where bureaucrats are called upon to exercise political discretion.
Since the mid-1990s, the U.S. Pentagon has accelerated efforts to outsource weapons, battlefield and base support operations, and troop training, invoking competition-based savings and better quality. I review the arguments for and against such privatization and summarize recent Pentagon outsourcing experience. I conclude that the current enthusiasm for privatization is driven largely by commercial concerns and lobbying rather than real gains to the nation and citizens, that it poses dangers of monopolization and undue political influence, and that current contracting practices lack verification and mandatory evaluation safeguards to deliver promised results.
Local government restructuring should no longer be viewed as a simple dichotomy between private and public provision. A 1997 survey of chief elected township and county officials in New York shows that local governments use both private and public sector mechanisms to structure the market, create competition, and attain economies of scale. In addition to privatization and inter-municipal cooperation, two alternative forms of service delivery not previously researched-reverse privatization and governmental entrepreneurship-are analyzed here. Logistic regression on the 201 responding governments differentiates the decision to restructure from the level and complexity of restructuring. Results confirm that local governments are guided primarily by pragmatic concerns with information, monitoring, and service quality. Political factors are not significant in the restructuring process and unionization is only significant in cases of simple restructuring (privatization or cooperation used alone). Fiscal stress is not a primary motivator, but debt limits are associated with more complex forms of restructuring. Restructuring service delivery requires capacity to take risks and is more common among experienced local officials in larger, higher-income communities. Restructuring should be viewed as a complex, pragmatic process where governments combine public and private provision with an active role as service provider and market player. © 2001 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.
Corruption is a threat to democracy and economic development in many societies. It arises in the ways people pursue, use and exchange wealth and power, and in the strength or weakness of the state, political and social institutions that sustain and restrain those processes. Differences in these factors, Michael Johnston argues, give rise to four major syndromes of corruption: Influence Markets, Elite Cartels, Oligarchs and Clans, and Official Moguls. Johnston uses statistical measures to identify societies in each group, and case studies to show that the expected syndromes do arise. Countries studied include the United States, Japan and Germany (Influence Markets); Italy, Korea and Botswana (Elite Cartels); Russia, the Philippines and Mexico (Oligarchs and Clans); and China, Kenya, and Indonesia (Offical Moguls). A concluding chapter explores reform, emphasising the ways familiar measures should be applied - or withheld, lest they do harm - with an emphasis upon the value of ‘deep democratisation’.
Inter‐municipal cooperation is now as common among US local governments as for profit privatization. This article uses data from a national survey in 2007 to explore the benefits of cooperation – economies of scale, service coordination across the metropolitan region and greater community control. While privatization reforms have focused on harnessing the benefits of a competitive market, cooperation may be the new frontier where economies of scale and efficiency gains can be achieved with governments working together in a new form of collaborative service delivery.
A costly signaling model is presented in which we show how campaign expenditures can buy votes. The model shows that the amount of campaign expenditures may convey the electorate information about the candidate's intended policy. When this model is extended to allow for a contributing interest group, it appears that for campaigning to be informative it is sometimes crucial that campaign funds are supplied by informed third parties. The extension also provides an explanation why interest groups contribute to the candidate's campaign, rather than using direct endorsements; they may need the candidate as an intermediary to filter their opposing interests.
The worldwide expansion in the use of private firms to deliver public services and infrastructure has promoted a substantial literature on public sector contract and relationship management. This literature is currently dominated by the notion that supplier relationships should be based upon trust. Less prominent are more sceptical approaches that emphasize the need to assiduously manage potential supplier exploitation and opportunism. This article addresses this imbalance by focusing upon the recent experience of the English National Health Service (NHS) in its dealings with its nursing agencies. Between 1997 and 2001, the NHS was subjected to considerable exploitation and opportunism. This forced managers to adopt a supply strategy based upon an assiduous use of e-auctions, framework agreements and quality audits. The article assesses the effectiveness of this strategy and reflects upon whether a more defensive approach to contract and relationship management offers a viable alternative to one based upon trust.
Governments not only choose which services to deliver to citizens, but they also choose how to deliver those services. Governments can produce services themselves or through a variety of external production mechanisms, including contracting with other governments, private firms, and nonprofits. In this article, we apply a transaction cost framework complemented with institutional and market theories to examine governments' service production decisions. Our analyses of a 1997 International City/County Management Association survey shows how governments choose service production mechanisms to manage the transaction costs inherent in delivering different types of services.
This article addresses three questions about notice and comment rule making. The first considers who participates: Who submits comments to federal agencies during the notice and comment period? The second considers the extent to which the comments alter the content of the rules. The third is about evaluating agency rule making in the context of the iron triangle and issue network models of policy making. The article examines eleven rules selected randomly at the EPA, NHTSA, and HUD. Among the findings are: a dearth of citizen commenters, the predominance of participation by business interests, and the presence of issue networks, and the absence of any discernible bias in whose voices get heard. The article concludes by suggesting that agencies fail to hear from all affected parties but that they are nonetheless put in the precarious position of arbitrating among competing interests.
This study addresses the question of political influence on the bureaucracy from the perspective of agency officials who are
being pressured. The article presents the results of a survey sent to senior federal government officials concerning the relative
impact of policy-making institutions on bureaucratic policy making. The survey differentiated between the types of mechanisms
used to influence bureaucratic policy. The results suggest that the perceptions of managers within the bureaucracy correspond
to many of the conclusions presented in the top-down studies of political influence. The bureaucracy appears to serve many
masters, all of whom have some influence on policy making. In addition, exploratory analyses comparing managers in independent
regulatory commissions with those in executive agencies suggest some important differences. The study provides an unique understanding
of policy making within the bureaucracy and determines whether or not these officials can be influenced by other institutions
of government.
Using agency and stewardship theories, this study examines how public administrators manage contracting relationships with nonprofit organizations. Interviews were conducted with public and nonprofit managers involved in social services contract relationships at the state and county level in New York State. The use of trust, reputation, and monitoring as well as other factors influence the manner in which contract relationships are managed. The findings suggest that the manner in which nonprofits are managed evolves over time from a principal-agent to a principal-steward relationship but with less variance than the theories would suggest. This results in part from the contextual conditions that include the type of service, lack of market competitiveness, and management capacity constraints. The intergovernmental environment in which social services are implemented and delivered presents complex challenges for public managers responsible for managing contract relationships. The findings from this study document those challenges and the corresponding management practices used with nonprofit contractors.
We argue that repeated interaction and high-powered formal contracts can be either substitutes or complements, depending on the relative impact of repeated interaction on incentive problems and contracting costs. In the offshore drilling industry, we find that oil and gas companies are less likely to choose fixed-price contracts as the frequency of their interaction with a driller increases. This supports the conclusion that repeated interaction and high-powered formal contracts are substitutes in this setting, indicating that repeated interaction reduces incentive problems more than contracting costs. In addition, we find that using instrumental variables to account for the endogenous matching of drillers to projects strengthens our results. Copyright 2004, Oxford University Press.
I model the allocation of tasks and assets to examine the interplay between these organizational design decisions. A principal delegates at least one of two tasks to an agent. The agent may take ownership of the asset and is compensated according to the optimal linear incentive contract on one imperfect performance measure. In general, the principal weighs a multi-task problem (if both tasks delegated) against a double moral hazard problem (if one task retained). I show that delegation of both tasks tends to go hand in hand with agent asset ownership, while principal asset ownership tends to accompany retention of one task. The former configuration is preferred to the latter when the double moral hazard problem is severe relative to the multi-task problem. When the potentially retained task has little effect on the asset value, a third optimal configuration arises, in which one task is retained by the principal, but the agent owns the asset.
The author develops a theoretical model that determines whether or not a firm sponsors a political action committee and, if it does, the quantity of funds that the political action committee will disburse. The firm is assumed to face supply and demand schedules for political action committee receipts, whose positions depend on attributes of the firm, such as firm size, government-sales intensity, and market structure. Two related equations derived from the theoretical model--a probit equation for political action committee sponsorship and a disbursements equation--are estimated using pooled data on 226 government (primarily defense) contracting firms during the 1979-80 and 1981-82 election cycles. Copyright 1989 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
Issue networks and the executive establishment Public Administration: Concepts and Cases, 413. Hedge, Regulating in space and time: The case of regulatory federalism
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Political Finance Database Syndromes of corruption: wealth, power, and democ-racy
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Contracting The tools of govern-ment: a guide to the new governance
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Kelman, S. (2002). Contracting. In L. Salamon (Ed.), The tools of govern-ment: a guide to the new governance (pp. 282–318). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
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Circular A-76 OECD principles for integrity in public procurement
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Congress and defense spending: The distributive politics of military procurement Privatization and public-private partnerships You don't always get what you pay for: the economics of privatization
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, B., & Carsey, T. M. (2002). Congress and defense spending: The distributive politics of military procurement (Vol. 3). Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. Savas, E. S. (2000). Privatization and public-private partnerships. New York, NY: Chatham House. Sclar, E. (2000). You don't always get what you pay for: the economics of privatization. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Bureaucratic dynamics: The role of bureaucracy in a democracy (p. 141) The decision to contract out: a study of contracting for e-government services in state governments
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