Political Action Committee Donations to Incumbent Senators; a Corruption Motive

This paper utilizes six-year Senate terms and two-year reporting periods to analyze if Political Action Committees are using their donations to influence the actions of sitting Senators as opposed to simply trying to get those with favorable policy views re-elected. Senators that are early in their careers who will have more influence in the long-term as well as Senators who currently already have influence would be those more likely to be targeted by Political Action Committees for this motive. Using clustered OLS regression with fixed effects and interaction terms, I find that there is in fact a "corruption" motive when it comes to Political Action Committees donating to sitting US Senators