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<p>Special interest money enters politics in a number of ways: Politicians solicit contributions that help in their election campaigns; they enrich themselves while in office by accepting bribes; or, increasingly in many countries, they go through the "revolving door" and take up lucrative post-government jobs in companies that were affected by their decisions in office. The central argument I make in this dissertation is that these different types of special interest money can act as functional substitutes and that their prevalence is a strategic choice. I examine this strategic choice theoretically and empirically, and provide insights into the consequences it has for policy and voters. I focus on two main factors: First, what consequences does the legal environment have? Second, what is the effect of the political environment? </p><p>Chapter 1 lays the theoretical groundwork. I study a formal model of political competition that determines whether and how special interest money enters politics. I show that laws criminalizing bribery or restricting campaign contributions lead to substitution effects and make other types of special interest money more common, in particular the revolving door. I also study the effect of legal restrictions on equilibrium policy and demonstrate that it only moves policy towards the median voter under certain circumstances. Higher political competitiveness leads incumbents to solicit campaign contributions, whereas the absence of competitiveness provides leeway for personal enrichment.</p><p>I test the effect of the legal and the political environment on the types of special interest money empirically, using newly assembled data from the world's two largest democracies. Chapter 2 examines the effect of the degree of political competition on the choice between personal enrichment while in office and campaign spending in India. Making use of detailed mandatory asset disclosure data of state assembly members that run in consecutive elections, I show that candidates with ties to business groups increase their wealth to a higher degree when they are electorally secure. Conversely, they hold larger cash reserves, which are crucial in campaigns, the less electorally secure they are. Using a survey experiment, I show that the way special interest money is used matters to voters.</p><p>Chapter 3 asks where tougher regulations of money in politics comes from. I argue that political entrepreneurs running on an anti-corruption platform play an important role and provide a simple formal exposition of the conditions under which voters are willing to vote for them. The implications of the model are tested for one of the most successful electoral performances of an anti-corruption party of our time: the 2013 debut of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in state elections in Delhi in India. Analyzing three rounds of pre-election surveys with a total of more than 40,000 respondents and election outcomes at the polling-booth level, I provide empirical support for the central insights of the formal model.</p><p>Finally, in Chapter 4 I study the effect of stricter regulations of bribery and campaign contributions on the revolving door, exploiting regulatory variation among the 50 state legislatures of the United States. Using a series of multilevel regression models, I show that former legislators are more likely to go through the revolving door and become lobbyists in states that make politicians less dependent on campaign contributions from special interests and that make it harder to earn money while in office. This suggests that politicians' movement into the private sector upon exiting office can act as a substitute for other types of special interest money.</p> / Dissertation

Doctor of Philosophy / School of Family Studies and Human Services / Sonya Britt / The purpose of this research study was to investigate the determinants that explain and predict Christian’s intentions to make lifetime gifts to charities. The research was guided by the theory of planned behavior (Ajzen, 1991) utilizing an expanded model that anticipated Christians who have (a) a favorable attitude toward giving, (b) a perceived pressure from social norms, (c) high levels of perceived behavioral control in their ability to make gifts, (d) a positive moral responsibility toward charitable giving, (e) a history of charitable giving, and (f) a faith based spiritual desire to pursue the Christian way of life would be more inclined to have giving intentions. Survey data were obtained through two pilot studies and a main study (N = 250). The pilot study participants were recruited through the researcher’s social network. The main study participants were enlisted through a contract with Qualtrics, an online survey organization that maintains panels of likely research subjects. Hierarchical linear regression identified support for traditional and expanded models of the theory of planned behavior. In the traditional model, attitude, subjective norm, and perceived behavioral control, all predicted donative intent. In the expanded model, not moral norms, past behavior, and the Christian way of life predicted donating intentions; however, perceived behavioral control a significant predictor in the traditional model, did not predict donative intent. The traditional theory of planned behavior accounted for 65%, and expanded predictors added 11% to the explanation of intention to donate to non-profit organizations in the coming year. The current research has both theoretical and applied implications. Consistent with Fishbein and Ajzen’s (2010) encouragement to improve the traditional model, the expanded model enhanced the predictive ability of the theory of planned behavior with a new determinant, the Christian way of life. The current research also reaffirms the predictive ability of the previously tested factor past behavior and not moral norms. Non-profit organizations may apply these findings by targeting the salient beliefs that are foundational to all predictors of intentions. The current research has identified beliefs associated with attitudes, social norms, perceived behavioral control, moral norms, past behavior, and the Christian way of life that offer non-profit organizations educational opportunities to intervene with donors to improve charitable behavior.

The first two chapters of this thesis analyze the response of blood donors to several features of the blood market in Portugal. The first provides estimates of the blood supply elasticity using changes in a benefit scheme for regular blood donors. In Portugal, starting from 2003, the government strictly enforced the collection of medical user fees, but with regular donors receiving a waiver. Using within-county variations in the value of the benefit, measured as the user fee for a visit to the Emergency Department, I find that the benefit increases the number of donations, both unconditionally and conditional on the number of blood drives. I estimate a one euro increase in the user fee to increase blood donations by 1.8%, on average. I also estimate a negative elasticity of blood drives with respect to the user fees. This indicates that benefits and blood drives are substitutes in eliciting blood donations. The second chapter analyzes how waiting to donate blood affects donor retention. I use a panel of new blood donors, in Portugal, between 2008 and 2012. I find that higher waiting times make it less likely for first-time donors to donate again, controlling for donor and donation site-specific variables. A 10-minute increase in waiting time until triage results in a 0.6% decrease in donor retention, on average. Donors in the upper tail of the waiting time distribution are driving the effect. New donors at blood drives react more negatively than new donors at blood donor centers. The third chapter (joint with Matteo Galizzi and Raffaele Miniaci) reports experimental evidence on risk preferences measures, from two waves of a representative sample of the UK Household Longitudinal Survey. The subjects responded to three tests: two incentive-compatible lottery tests and a survey test measuring self-reported willingness to take risk. We find significant but low correlations between the responses to the three tests across time. Furthermore, we find that at least two thirds of the subjects made inconsistent choices across lottery tests, when controlling for individual-specific levels of background income. Finally, we find mixed evidence concerning the external validity of these tests.

Although the link between violent video games and aggressive behavior has received extensive coverage, there is growing evidence that prosocial video games can exert a positive influence as well. However, whether these effects generalize to costlier prosocial behaviors that help more distant recipients remains unclear. Here I propose an experimental study to examine whether prosocial video games can influence charitable donation behavior. College students will be randomly assigned to play 45 min of either a prosocial video game (Lemmings) or neutral video game (Tetris), followed by a 10 min filler task (mental calculation). Participants will then be asked to complete a payment form, indicating if they want to donate a portion of their experimental participation payment to a local nonprofit organization. Based on previous research, we predict that there will be a main effect of gender, with female participants more likely to donate than males. Additionally, we hypothesize a main effect of video game, where participants who play the prosocial video game will be likelier to donate than those who play the neutral game. If confirmed, these results would extend the existing literature on prosocial video games beyond informal face-to-face helping behaviors, potentially providing a psychological mechanism for costlier needs such as charitable appeals.

The nonprofit sector is becoming increasingly important to the U.S. economy both as an employer and service provider. Although most of the sector’s revenues are earned, the ability of the nonprofit sector to generate significant levels of unearned income in the form of grants and contributions reinforces the sector’s uniqueness. This dissertation uses the NCCS-Guidestar data to address questions pertaining to the determinants of nonprofits’ contributions and government grants. Each of the essays’ findings is discussed briefly below. The first chapter examines the relationship between an organization’s finances and the level of government grants received. Because organizations choose to apply for government grants, a Heckman procedure is coupled with fixed effects to produce unbiased, within organization estimates. When controlling for the probability an organization receives grant funding, the average level of grants an organization receives generally increases with improvements in efficiency measures. In testing Brooks’ (2004) adjusted performance measure, the author finds that for many categories of nonprofit organizations, improvements in performance relative to community expectations increase grants for recipients, but better performance reduces the probability an organization receives any government grants. The second essay examines the determinants of direct support to organizations in four of the major categories, namely Arts, Education, Health, and Human Services, using instrumental and panel techniques. Unlike government grants, changes in price do not affect organizations’ expected contributions. When significant, government grants generally crowd out private donations while the effects of program service revenue vary by category and specification. The final essay examines the effects of nonprofit expenses and revenues on direct support for organizations in four small subcategories, Disaster Preparedness, International Aid, Environmental Conservation, and Performing Arts. The essay tests whether the impact of various revenue and expense variables on direct support changes around an unexpected event such as 9/11. Results suggest that the events of 9/11 had a greater moderating effect for categories losing funding compared to categories that received a windfall of contributions.

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This thesis explores some theoretical and empirical issues in the voluntary contributions to public good. Chapter I contains a brief motivation and introduction. In chapters II and III, we analyze two non-cooperative methods for either enhancing or mitigating externality-causing activities. Chapter II deals with positive externality in the public good contribution context, and chapter III with negative externality in the pollution abatement context. Chapter IV contains an empirical analysis of charitable donations by the elderly. Chapter II models the so-called ``corporate challenge gift'' used in real world fund-raising, and adopts the concept to voluntary contributions to public goods more generally. We model the process as a sequential game in public good contributions. One of the agents sets a quantity-contingent matching scheme to leverage higher contributions from the other players. Under the assumption that the preferences of agents are public information and the assumption that the scheme setter can commit to the matching plan, we show that the scheme brings efficient levels of total contributions to the public good. Chapter III applies some ideas from a joint work with Professor Robin Boadway and Professor Jean-Fran\c{c}ois Tremblay on ``Commitment and Matching Contributions to Public Goods'' to the issue of reducing negative externality-causing activity. In particular, it adapts both the Guttman-Danziger-Schnytzer type of rate-matching mechanism and the quantity-contingent matching method for public good contributions to the international pollution abatement problem. In a simple two-country model, we find that both matching schemes induce the countries to internalize the negative externality imposed on the other country. However, perhaps due to the lack of enough policy instruments, they cannot equate the marginal costs of abatement across the countries, leaving room for Pareto improvement. This further improvement can be achieved if the two countries also contribute to a conventional public~good. Chapter IV is an empirical exercise on some positive externality-generating activities by the elderly. It attempts to document the charitable giving of money and time by people aged 60 or above in the 2003 PSID data for the United States and analyze the influences of some economic and demographic factors on these activities. Income, wealth, the subjective rating of health status, and years in school are found to have statistically significant impacts. Income and wealth appear to have distinct influences. The tax price of money donation also has a statistically significant effect on money donations. / Thesis (Ph.D, Economics) -- Queen's University, 2007-11-19 01:48:10.777

Nonprofit organization senior leaders conduct business in an increasingly complex and competitive market environment relying on monetary donations to sustain the capacity of their organizations to meet service requirements. The purpose of this single case study was to explore the strategies that nonprofit organization senior leaders used to motivate donors to make monetary donations to their organizations. The target population of the study was 3 senior leaders of a nonprofit organization in the southeastern United States who implemented effective strategies to motivate donors to make monetary donations to their organization. The conceptual framework used for this study was self-determination theory. Data collection for this study consisted of semistructured participant interviews, a review of public and internal organization documentation, and organization performance outcomes. Data for this study were manually coded and thematically organized. The analysis of the data identified relationships, effective communication, active listening, and social media marketing as 4 key themes affecting donors’ motivation to donate to nonprofit organizations. The implications of this study for positive social change include the potential to provide practical strategies that nonprofit organization senior leaders can use to motivate donors to make monetary donations to their organizations, thereby enhancing senior leaders’ capacity to provide critical services to members of the communities in their organizations’ dedicated service areas.