Since Tullock (1972) first asked why there is so little money in U.S. politics, several studies have found evidence that political activism has the potential to yield significant returns. This study is the first to directly investigate the returns to public sector union activism by leveraging a transactions-level dataset from the National Institute on Money in Politics to estimate the relationship between teachers' union campaign contributions and the generosity of teacher pension systems. Our results show that more politically engaged teachers’ unions, as evidenced by their aggregate campaign contributions, are successful at both securing a higher level of retirement benefits and at shifting a greater burden of the financing of those benefits to the sponsoring government. Our estimates are in line with recent related studies and imply an investment return on campaign contributions of nearly 1500%.

自从塔洛克 (1972) 首次询问为什么美国政治中的资金如此之少以来，一些研究已经发现证据表明政治激进主义有可能产生显着的回报。本研究首次通过利用国家政治货币研究所的交易级数据集来估计教师工会运动捐款与教师养老金制度的慷慨程度之间的关系，直接调查公共部门工会激进主义的回报。我们的结果表明，政治参与度更高的教师工会，正如他们的竞选捐款总额所证明的那样，在确保更高水平的退休福利和将更大的资助这些福利的负担转移给资助政府。我们的估计与最近的相关研究一致，意味着竞选捐款的投资回报接近 1500%。