Comment by bobcostas55 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bobcostas55 | Hacker News Reader

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>I dislike money being such an important factor in politics these days instead of oh.... how candidates actually vote.

There's a large empirical literature on the issue and the conclusion is that money is more or less irrelevant in politics. Political campaigns are entirely ineffective.

The Minimal Persuasive Effects of Campaign Contact in General Elections: Evidence from 49 Field Experiments [0]

"First, a systematic meta-analysis of 40 field experiments estimates an average effect of zero in general elections. Second, we present nine original field experiments that increase the statistical evidence in the literature about the persuasive effects of personal contact 10-fold. These experiments’ average effect is also zero."

Does Money Buy Votes? The Case of Self-Financed Gubernatorial Candidates, 1998–2008 [1]

"The apparent effect of spending on votes is severely inflated by omitted variable bias: the best candidates also happen to be the best fundraisers. [...] self-financed spending has no statistical effect on election results"

[0] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3042867

[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11109-012-9193-1

Surprisingly, neither of those papers appear to have anything to do with your point that "money is more or less irrelevant in politics". The first seems about personal contact, the second whether where the money came from made any difference, not whether they had any.

When there's no candidate, it's still money that wins initiatives in the western USA. I don't care what that particular study concluded over 40 races of self-financed Gov candidates because it's not compelling. Existing studies of interest that acknowledge definitive correlation only differ in how to measure the degree and where diminishing returns occur.

> There's a large empirical literature on the issue and the conclusion is that money is more or less irrelevant in politics.

That's simply nonsense.

Not everything that happens in law is done through voting though and thus the legislation and lobbying done is studied. I remember someone publishing some results showing that for as little as $50k to a politician’s campaign you can get a return on investment many times over depending upon your industry. In fact, I’d argue the most important things that happen in government is what we do not get to vote on, which is part of why voting is so important - the elected officials fill in the differential.

About that..

"We find no evidence that corporations benefit from electing their favored candidate, and we can statistically reject effect sizes greater than 0.4 percent of firm value. Contrary to the concerns of many observers, corporate campaign contributions do not appear to buy significant political favors."

http://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/spenkuch/researc...

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