Individual Donor Motivations & Out-of-District Contributions in House Elections

• In Event: Poster Session: Predicting Political Participation

Abstract

To what extent have shifting patterns of political participation reinforced the trend toward nationalization in US politics since the 1980s? To answer this question, we investigate changes over time in out-of-district congressional campaign contributions by individual donors. Our paper proceeds in four steps. First, we document secular trends in the relative incidence of in-district and out-of-district contributions since the 1980s. Second, relying on version 3.1 of the DIME database (Bonica 2023), we assess the extent to which these secular trends are driven by changes in the behavior of recurrent individual donors or replacement of more locally-focused donors by more nationally-focused ones. Third, we examine the extent to which shifts in the electoral security of a contributor’s member of Congress induce changes in national outlook. Unlike recent research (Waldfogel 2022) that relies on cross-sectional variation in whether or not a donor was redistricted into a more or less competitive district, our identification strategy for this portion of the analysis relies on intertemporal within-donor variation and idiosyncratic variation in election outcomes within districting cycles. Finally, we assess trends in the extent to which out-of-district donations are directed primarily toward candidates in competitive races elsewhere; toward primaries vs. general elections; and toward relatively ideologically extreme vs. moderate candidates. In addition to documenting a potential contributing factor to the nationalization of US politics, our results suggest the value of distinguishing between nationalization and polarization, while also shedding light on the strategic motivations of individual donors.

Authors

• Sanford C. Gordon, New York University

• Leah Umanskiy Stein, Harvard University

• Kyle Van Rensselaer, New York University