Attendance rates, political shirking, and the effect of post-elective office employment

Economic Inquiry, Jan, 1990 by John R. Lott, Jr.

(1) Some circumstantial evidence of constituent services' importance is provided by Florida [1977, chapter 7], while Cain et al. [1987, 176-89] provide direct empirical evidence of the role that such services play in determining the probability by which a congressman and a member of Britain's parliament will be reelected.

(2) Lott [1987b] is the only attempt I know of that tries to explain how attendance rates for politicians change when they no longer face reelection. While in general, a similar specification will be used here, Lott [1987b] does not address the question of how post-elective office employment of politicians and/or their children affect the cost of shirking through attendance rates during their last term. While that paper does investigate the effect of post-elective office employment on how a politician votes when he does vote, it is not a "fair" test of the usefulness of future employment in constraining shirking. This is because if the ideology of politicians coincides sufficiently closely to that of their constituents, no cheating will exist in terms of how a politician votes and so there is nothing to constrain. As section II points out, the question of how often a politician votes can be fundamentally different from how he votes when he does vote (see also Lott [1987a]).

(3) Becker and Stigler [1974, 11-12] and Barro [1973] were the first to recognize explicitly that a premium may exist for holding office, the threatened loss of which makes shirking by politicians costly. Lott [1987a; 1987b] argues that opportunistic behavior by politicians in terms of how they vote, when they do vote, can be solved though ideology. Benson and Baden [1985] discuss the problems of legislators monitoring the shirking or cheating behavior of bureaucra Landes and Posner [1975] and Crain and Tollison [1979] discuss various mechanisms used to guarantee "contracts" made with special-interest groups. (See also Coats and Dalton [1989] and Van Beek [1989] for recent work supporting my earlier findings.) The discussion here focuses on how an alternative mechanism--post-elective office employment--enforces implicit contracts made by legislators.

(4) As Eckert notes [1981, 120] his evidence is equally consistent with future employment acting either as a bribe "for votes on the bench that were favorable to the industry or a particular firm" or as "the return on the investment in human capital that the commissioner made by learning the details and politics of regulation...."

(5) As the cost of shirking in terms of forgone future support is reduced, politicians are expected also to purchase more leisure by producing less output in the other dimensions mentioned earlier (e.g., case work). While it is hyothetically possible that a retiring congressman votes less congressmen in their last term suddenly begin to produce a different mix of output, this seems doubtful. First, it is not clear why changes in voter preferences would be related to their congressman's term in office. Second, given that retiring incumbents do not have to run for reelection, it seems unlikely that the increase in the amount of time necessary to produce these other outputs would be so great that it not only absorbs the time savings from not having to campaign but also requires a reduction in the time devoted to voting on legislation.