Moral Hazard and Special Interests in Congress∗

We exploit the precise timing of domestic natural disasters to study the connection between public attention to politics and legislator support for special interests. Our findings show that when a disaster strikes, the news media reduce both their coverage of politics in general as well as that of individual congresspeople in particular. In addition, citizens are less likely to search for Congress-related keywords online. At the very same time, members of the U.S. House of Representatives become substantially more likely to adopt the positions of special-interest donors as they vote on bills. Taken together, the evidence we present suggests that politicians are more inclined to take actions that benefit special interests when the public is temporarily distracted. More broadly, our findings imply that contemporaneous attention improves electoral accountability, even in an environment with stringent transparency and disclosure requirements. ∗We have benefited from helpful comments by Sandeep Baliga, Marco Battaglini, Laurent Bouton, Allan Drazen, Georgy Egorov, Ruben Enikolopov, Ray Fisman, Anthony Fowler, Ernest Koh, Mary Kroeger, Daniel Magleby, Pablo Montagnes, Benjamin Ogden, Nicola Persico, David Strömberg, Hye Young You, and audience members at Deakin, Emory, Houston, Maryland, Monash, Montreal, Mannheim as well as the NYULSE Political Economy Conference, European Meeting of the Econometric Society, APEN, POLECONUK, and the Washington Area Political Economy Research Workshop. Spenkuch gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Ford Motor Company Center for Global Citizenship at Northwestern University. All errors and omissions are our own. Correspondence can be addressed to Kaplan at kaplan@econ.umd.edu, Spenkuch at j-spenkuch@kellogg.northwestern.edu, or Yuan at h.yuan@uq.edu.au.