Organized Interests and Political Extortion: A Test of the Fetcher Bill Hypothesis

Although the Fetcher Bill Hypothesis, which is that legislators introduce bills in order to extort campaign contributions from organized interests, has been given new prominence by suggestions that it can provide a general explanation of the composition of legislative agendas and the structure of interest communities, tests of the hypothesis are narrow, rare, and indirect. We provide an alternative test to more directly assesses its core implications. Copyright (c) 2005 by the Southwestern Social Science Association.