E ainda mais outro...

Este sobre a votação (a da semana passada, não a de hoje), não sobre o bailout em si:

Who in Congress Voted for the (First) Bailout and Why? no The Art of the Possible:

But apparently there is more truth in the ideological factor: The two tails of the ideological bell curve in Congress were more likely to vote against the bailout, albeit for quite different reasons. (Though viewed through an applied democratic lens, it is those who supported the bailout that occupy the tails.) This according to Sarah Binder and Mark Spindel at the popular political science blog The Monkey Cage, who claim that ideology drove vote patterns in the House even after controlling for possible threats to incumbents’ prospects for re-election:

…on both the left and right legislators were guided by their ideological commitments. Within the GOP conference, the more conservative the Republican, the more likely she voted against the bill. Nearly three quarters of Republican conservatives voted against the bill, joined by more than half of their moderate brethren. Ideological effects are visible even after we take into account the state of play for November. Conservatives running in safe seats were far more likely to vote against the bill than moderates in a similar boat.

[...]

Democrats’ votes were also shaped by their ideological inclinations. The more liberal the House Democrat, the more likely she was to vote against the bill, even among those running in the most competitive seats. Arguing that the package bailed out financial firms while doing little to help homeowners on the verge of foreclosure to stay in their homes, liberal votes against the plan are not surprising. Democrats from states with high subprime foreclosure rates were just as likely as Democrats untouched by the subprime crisis to vote for the bill.

There is also this intriguing and economically reductionist finding, showing that those who voted for the bailout disproportionately received campaign contributions from AIG and the like:

Overall, bailout supporters received an average of 54 percent more in campaign contributions from banks and securities than bailout opponents over the last five years. The disparity also held true if you look at individual parties. In fact, the 140 Democrats who voted for the bailout received almost twice as much money from banks and securities as the 95 Democrats who voted against it. (The difference was closer to 50 percent for Republicans.)

As prima facie evidence for straight up corruption it’s tempting to misdirect the flow of causation. More likely than funding making politics, it’s the other way around. Because those who voted for the bill are more “moderate”, they find big, mainstream institutions more to their minimally ideological liking. Binder and Spindel note that those representatives from higher income jurisdictions were also more likely to vote for the bailout. Now these higher income folks can’t all be beneficiaries of AIG largess, but they can believe that AIG, the Fed, the Chicago School and Keynesianism are all more or less laudable institutions and economic perspectives…respectively.