Can the actions of a person in office to seek benefits from that office that are not in the principals’ interests (voters) be called “rent seeking”? For instance, I had assumed that “rent seeking” by politicians was when they sought favors, donations or bribes in return for assistance on some law, but perhaps the term only applies to the behavior of the firm that is seeking the policy adjustment?
The question seems a little mushy to me. I’d be more inclined to describe your situation as abuse of office (or, in the case of your example of favors-for-assistance-in-passing-a-law, ‘politics’), although if it makes a good sound bite, it’ll be appropriated.
Professor Sterk’s article, for what it’s worth, deals with what I’ve always thought of as a paradigm case of rent-seeking - students lobbying professors and administration for favors.
Nope, that falls under the Principal-Agent problem.
Er…a firm that is trying to get higher-than competitive profits is rent seeking; rent is economic profit in excess of (all the costs, including) opportunity cost, so if one is making an economic profit, then one is getting economic rent. So a firm that is anti-competitive to maintain a monopoly, and thus monopoly profits, then the firm is rent seeking. A politician who engages in graft is a subject of the principal-agent problem, where the issue is setting up the rules so that the representative does right by the principal.
This is one of those things that the use of the technical term says something about the more general political stance of the writer.
A rent is a payment above opportunity cost. The concept comes from the idea that there’s a fixed amount of land and that rents paid to landowners are not required in order to keep the land in existence. This is unlike most things where unless the marginal cost of making them was paid, they wouldn’t come into existence.
Rent seeking is the expenditure of resources (ie bribes don’t count, they’re just a transfer) to acquire a rent. Given that the rent exists regardless of payment, any use of resources spent in pursuit of the rent is a pure waste to society.
Those who think that government doesn’t do much that is productive (providing public goods etc) but rather creates and sells licences for monopolies tend to view most political activity as rent-seeking. They see government as having control over some fixed bunch of resources and the rents being dissipated by expenditures of those who compete to dole out favours (politicians and bureaucrats) and those who compete for favours (producer interests).
Rent seeking is not a different sort of behaviour to other economic behaviour: it is just a situation where people trying to make a buck cost society a dollar for every dollar they spend.
What about the median voter?? 
This thread gives me nasty flashbacks to my undergrad polisci classes.
Here’s a good example: A guy finishing his dissertation in econ, when I was in grad school, was married to a lawyer. Predictably, he didn’t shy away from lawyer jokes. When he first told me that his wife was an attorney, he referred to her as “one of those rent-seeking lawyers,” playing on the stereotype that lawyers create friction to keep up their incomes at the expense of the rest of us. I.e., lawers create lawsuits where none should exist, simply to make work for themselves.
Being in local government, I hear this notion—not stated in terms of rent-seeking—expressed quite often; i.e., lawyers are filing motions and arguing points of law simply to keep their bank accounts full rather than to do what’s right or just. As pointed out, the sentiment says more about the person saying it than about lawyers: my lawyers are covering my ass when I’m trying to do right by the law, and therefore I see no rent-seeking.
(Sometimes, they have to do what looks like rent-seeking to virtually everybody because of the law. For example, it is not clear whether Michigan townships may grant so-called use variances, so most simply don’t give the authority to their Boards of Appeals. Yet, before someone can sue, arguing that they’ve been wrongly prevented from using a piece of land in a particular way, they have to go to the township’s Board of Appeals for a variance that the board has no authority to grant. It seems bizarre, but they’re required to exhaust all legal remedies at one stage before moving to a higher stage.)
It was obvious that the guy was joking about his wife, and I’m not supporting the stereotype; however, I think it illustrates well the notion of “rent-seeking” behavior as used in the OP and as explained by Hawthorne.