Individual party donors

Abstract

Habitual party donors represent an important revenue source for American political parties. What remains unclear is whether the party committees can also count on these donors to support the congressional candidates who represent the parties’ best chances for seat maximization. Utilizing structural equation modeling and contribution data from the 2006 to the 2012 election cycles, I find habitual party donors and certain new party donors respond to changes in party control of the House by providing more support to incumbents when their party is in the majority and more support to nonincumbents when their party is in the minority. Moreover, party donors are more likely to give to congressional candidates, especially those competing in priority races, than nonparty donors. Party donors additionally are revealed to be an important funding source for congressional candidates.

Out-of-State Contributions Provide Non-Incumbent House Candidates with a Competitive Edge

“…The parties’ hard dollar contributions to the campaign have a significant indirect effect on out-of-state fundraising—party contributions significantly increase the likelihood of PAC contributions, which in turn are associated with greater success in raising out-of-state contributions. Thus, in line with previous studies, national donors in this study are shown to be responsive to parties’ signals to the EPN (Baker, 2016a; Herrnson & Kirkland, 2013; Kolodny & Dwyre, 2018). Additionally, transfers from other committees positively and significantly increase the likelihood of out-of-state contributions suggesting parties’ joint fundraisers, which largely make up those transfers, are key conduits for out-of-state contributions—again, suggesting many out-of-state donors take their cues about which candidates to support from the parties’ national committees.…”

“…And this set of “strategic donors” (Rhodes et al, 2016) have the greatest influence when it comes to interest group support of candidate campaigns. This is likely because national donors are members of multiple interest group organizations (Francia et al, 2003), have volunteered on campaigns (Francia et al, 2003), are networked with other donors living in the same wealthy zip codes (Cho-Tam & Gimpel, 2007; Gimpel et al, 2006; Gimpel et al, 2008), and many campaign donors are habitual party donors as well (Baker, 2016a). Examining non-incumbent candidate support is a great way to test these relationships as many of the candidates are new to politics and do not have established fundraising bases or name recognition (Jacobson & Carson, 2016).…”

“…Although the authors say “partisan coordination, rather than individual initiative, offers a more plausible account” for the contribution patterns they uncover, the authors do not take into account that frequent “harvesting” from a district—which they do document—might educate habitual donors overtime. Baker (2016a) study of party donors demonstrates this potential educative effect as well as donor responsiveness to collective goals. By their second election cycle of giving, the newest party donors showed observable improvements in their likelihood of supporting party priority congressional races in 2008 and 2012.…”

“…Donors and activists are an important part of the EPN as they make up the membership of organizations with affiliated PACs. Additionally, many party committee donors are also repeat contributors to House races (Baker, 2016a)—in this sense party donors operate in a networked way. If candidates are a consumption good, then parties and interest groups have to keep the consumer in mind and consumers, just as they do outside of the political marketplace, will signal to producers which products they prefer and which they do not.…”

Gotong Royong Culture as an Alternative to Political Funding in Local Election

“…Democracy is a system in which the government is controlled by the people, and in which the people are considered equal in exercising that control (Baker, 2018;Fenton, 2017). However, unequal access to political funding leads to improper political gamesmanship (Edelman, 2020;Kusumasari, 2020).…”