Page 31 - Azerbaijan State University of Economics

THE JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC SCIENCES: THEORY AND PRACTICE

election cycles are liberal. Incidentally, liberals are putting more emphasize

on advocacy groups, and they utilize them on a regular basis.
As presented in Table 3, a break-down of 527 advocacy group

spending decisions by the expenditure category is available in a detail. There

are twenty nine specific expenditure lines; and there are eight main
categories: administrative, campaign expenses, fundraising, other, media,

contributions, transfers, and unknown.
In our analyses, we combined the unknown and other into one

category. Also, to better address the issues in hand, we focused on
administrative expenses, campaign expenses, polling and survey research,

campaign direct mailing, media, fundraising, and contributions.

Political Expenditures by 527 Groups

In this section, we examine the composition of political expenditures
by advocacy groups. Specifically, we conduct analyses to determine whether

groups’ ideology and type, in addition to whether they were active in one or

multiple election cycles, make a difference in the way groups consume
political goods. We have two claims. Our first claim is that the groups that

solely exist to inform and influence voters on a particular issue would be
spending more on short term, non-durable goods. For instance, they would

be spending more on media, and they would be allocating more on campaign

expenses such as polling and direct mailing. If indeed this claim is valid, we
should expect to see a kind of magnification effect by observing independent

one-cycle groups spending even more on these political goods.
Our second claim is that unions and political party advocacy groups

with a multiple-cycle presence are likely to take a longer view of election
campaigns. It makes sense for union groups (and obviously party affiliated

groups) to have their own selected agents to represent and advance their

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