Detecting and Understanding Donor Strategies in Midterm Elections

Abstract

What explains how political donors decide where to give? Existing research indicates that people donate money to express support for a preferred political “team” and enjoy the emotional benefits of participating in politics. While this explains why people donate, it does little to help understand the different strategies that donors may pursue. In this paper, we use data on individual decisions as to where to allocate contributions to provide fresh insight into the strategies donors are pursuing. Our approach yields a much more nuanced view of campaign finance by showing how differently situated donors pursue divergent contribution strategies. Of particular note, we identify an influential class of engaged and wealthy political donors that spreads their dollars widely, especially focusing on giving to out-of-jurisdiction candidates. This illustrates just how influential the recent elimination of aggregate contribution limits may be in allowing a small share of donors to be broadly influential.

Interest Group Activists and the Polarization of State Legislatures

“…Like formal party committees, party insiders , individuals who contribute to legislators and to state party committees, may have partisan incentives. However, evidence from Rhodes, Schaffner, and La Raja () suggests that party insiders (closely related to what the authors call “party‐oriented donors”) may contribute in less strategic patterns than other donors. Not only are individuals who mostly give to party committees less likely to be wealthy and politically engaged; they also “either demonstrate no clear strategy in their giving behavior or choose to simply focus on giving to what is arguably the most ‘obvious’ target of donations—their preferred political party” (Rhodes, Schaffner, and La Raja , 513).…”

Association membership, election cycles, and political donation patterns

“…The centrist tone adopted during presidential elections creates more demand for centrist causes and campaigns. By contrast, during midterm cycles, the small jurisdictions at stake represent geographically small communities of people who are more likely to share homogenous traits, life experiences, and political attitudes (Rhodes et al 2018 ). This means that in especially partisan districts, contributions will flow to correspondingly partisan candidates and causes.…”

Protest as One Political Act in Individuals’ Participation Repertoires: Latent Class Analysis and Political Participant Types

“…Social science researchers have used LCA to analyze a wide variety of topics, including tolerance (McCutcheon, 1985; Sniderman et al, 1989), party support (Breen, 2000), opinion-changing behavior (Hill & Kriesi, 2001), citizenship norms (Hooghe et al, 2016; Hooghe & Oser, 2015; Oser & Hooghe, 2013; Sampermans et al, 2020); revolutionary groups (Beissinger, 2013), technocratic attitudes (Bertsou & Caramani, 2020), nationalist sentiment (Bonikowski & DiMaggio, 2016), democratic ideals (Hooghe et al, 2017; Hooghe & Oser, 2018; Oser & Hooghe, 2018a, 2018b), and political donor types (Rhodes et al, 2018). Although LCA is not yet widely used for the study of political participation repertoires, a handful of recent studies have used the technique to identify distinct types of political participants (e.g., Alvarez et al, 2017; Johann et al, 2020; Keating & Melis, 2017; Oser, 2017; Oser et al, 2013; Oser et al, 2014; Steenvoorden, 2018).…”