POLITICAL-PARTY PURPOSE, INDIVIDUAL VOTES, AND POLITICAL-ACTION COMMITTEE CONTRIBUTIONS

The authors use two different data sources to confront the question of whether a party's primary economic purpose is to sell special favors or alternatively to provide information and serve as an ideological la bel. Although not denying the proposition that politicians sell specia l favors, it does present results consistent with the subordination of favor specialization to ideological specialization. Besides referring to earlier published results, this article analyzes individual voting data in presidential and congressional elections in the United States and contributions by groups of individuals and types of special inter est classes to incumbent members of the US Senate and House. These res ults also imply that there is no need to assume differential abilities to provide favors to special interest groups to explain differential success rates in more or less aggregated political jurisdictions.