Concentrated Benefits versus Diffused Costs: How a Minority Political Interests Win
Interest groups may succeed in obtain political benefits by spreading the expense of the broader political base. The benefits motivate the interest group, while the relatively small “expense” fails to have a similar motivating effect upon the broader political base. Examples include: School Board Elections, School Bond and Tax Increase Election, and Public Financing of Sports Stadiums. In this case “benefits” could be monetary, regulatory, or public assistance.
In politics, as in economics, incentives matter. It follows that benefits given to a smaller group of individuals provide a greater incentive to each individual to support the measure. If the cost of providing that benefit is spread out over a larger group of the populace - each individual faces a smaller incentive to fight against the measure. University of Maryland’s Mancur Olson theorized in his first book The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups (1965) that motivating a group toward or against a particular action becomes increasingly difficult as the size of the group increases. As Wallace Forman writes in his blog Commentarius, “self-interested voters rationally allow themselves to be robbed a penny at a time.”
Smaller interest groups increase the odds of success when they are able to shift elections or referendums to non-traditional voting dates, for example school board and city counsel elections. Individuals employed by school districts are highly motivated to take the time to vote compared to other members of body politic.
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