Does evidence matter when it tells us something we’d already thought was true? Via FiveThirtyEight:
haven’t been able to conclusively prove that money buys influence. McKay’s study doesn’t even put an end to this strange lacuna in political science. She herself acknowledges that it isn’t a smoking gun. McKay took on a challenge. She succeeded. She ended up more cynical.
Those votes have been the focus of much of the research concerning money and politics, and they suggest that there’s not much to find. More than 40 years of study has largely failed to turn up strong correlations between monetary donations and the outcomes of those votes, said Stephen Ansolabehere, a professor of government at Harvard.
Partly that’s because there are lots of competing pressures attached to both roll call votes and campaign donations. People donate to politicians who already share their views. Politicians are already primed to be concerned about business issues that affect the economy in their district, and the same politician may have multiple donors taking opposite sides on the same vote. Meanwhile, roll call votes are very public things. Your party expects to see certain choices. So do your constituents.
Then she started trying to see how the comments shaped the proposed amendments. She used plagiarism-detection software, like the kind professors use to spot cheating undergrads, to match text from public-comment letters with text in amendments. When she found text that appeared to have been copied from one to the other, she checked whether those comments were linked to any political donations.
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