Interest Groups and the Demand for Agricultural Research

This paper applies a model of the demand for public goods to explain cross-sectional differences in public allocations to agricultural research in the United States. The model postulates that demanders of agricultural research on the state level--primarily farmers and firms producing agricultural inputs--contribute voluntarily to lobbying activity either by voting or by making campaign contributions in order to induce research allocations. A "concentration effect" is derived, in which political participation by the relatively large demanders increases relative to participation by the relatively small demanders, as group size becomes large. The implications of the model are found to be consistent with American data on agricultural research allocations in 1969.