CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS AND ACCESS

An important and pervasive view of campaign contributions is that they are given to promote access to successful candidates under circumstan ces when such access would not ordinarily be given. In this story, acc ess is valuable as it offers groups the opportunity to influence legis lative decisions through the provision of policy-relevant information. Under complete information regarding donors' policy preferences, I ar gue that this model predicts a negative relationship between contribut ions and the extent to which the groups' and the recipient legislators ' preferences are similar. However, one of the more robust empirical f indings in the literature is that this relationship is positive. Relax ing the informational assumption on donors' preferences, I reexamine t he access story with a model in which campaign contributions can act a s signals of policy preference and the (informational) value of access to any agent is endogenous.