Business

Jake Jares

Holding on to High Cotton: How Narrow Economic Interests Resist Policy Retrenchment
2023–24 American Democracy Fellowship

Since Olson (1965) first theorized that beneficiaries of programs inducing “concentrated benefits and diffuse costs” reap disproportionate benefits to policy advocacy, researchers and the general public alike have come to expect special interest groups to hold on to their privileged economic policy stakes. However, using administrative, legislative, and survey data, I bridge political economy and political behavior research to argue that certain special interests hold political capital prior to any lobbying or electoral mobilization, simply because they are viewed as more appealing recipients of government assistance. In particular, I conjecture that individuals’ intrinsic concern for local or regional enterprises can explain much of the disproportionate political advantages of “special interest” programs relative to “general interest” initiatives.
 

I examine a puzzle along these lines in a study of the modern US farm safety net, the latest successor to a lineage of “farm subsidy” programs extending back to the Great Depression. Today, the scattered remnants of the US farm sector reside within uncompetitive districts represented by conservative Republicans. While these conservative members have shown historically high levels of combativeness towards other safety net programs, ubiquitous calls from conservative think tanks and activist groups to phase out the farm safety net have consistently failed to yield momentum in Congress, despite frequent opportunities presented by the twice- per-decade farm bill reauthorization. American farming thus appears to have experienced an order-of-magnitude collapse in relative economic stature, without a concomitant decline in political stature.

I hypothesize that the resilience of the farm safety net amidst these challenges reflects an important geographic feature of political behavior in the United States: many individuals have a strong predilection for distinctly local businesses, and this bias cuts across partisan and ideological lines. Just as political scientists emphasize the importance of candidate “valence advantages” in the electoral arena, I aim to gauge the extent and source of constituent valence advantages in the policymaking arena.

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