Abstract
Major campaign donors are highly concentrated geographically. A relative handful of neighborhoods accounts for the bulk of all money contributed to political campaigns. Public opinion in these elite neighborhoods is very different from that in the country as a whole and in low-donor areas. On a number of prominent political issues, the prevailing viewpoint in high-donor neighborhoods can be characterized as cosmopolitan and libertarian, rather than populist or moralistic. Merging Federal Election Commission contribution data with three recent large-scale national surveys, we find that these opinion differences are not solely the result of big-donor areas’ high concentration of wealthy and educated individuals. Instead, these neighborhoods have a distinctive political ecology that likely reinforces and intensifies biases in opinion. Given that these locales are the origin for the lion’s share of campaign donations, they may steer the national political agenda in unrepresentative directions.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
In 2008, a year in which campaign contributions shattered all previous records, a mere 15% of Americans surveyed reported making a donation of any amount to a campaign; in 2007, the percentage was 8% (Pew Research Center 2008).
For this calculation, we sum the itemized FEC contributions to all federal election candidates and both major parties from each zip code.
Without question, there is a positive association between areas of high income and locations that give large contributions, but this correlation is not as strong as one might expect. (Correlating median income and contribution amounts yields the following results for 2004: ρ = 0.40; p ≤ 0.001; for 2000: ρ = 0.25; p ≤ 0.001.) There is considerable discrepancy between where the rich reside and where rich political activists reside. Correlating professional employment and education level with contribution amounts yields similar results. Indicators for all these constructs are positively associated with campaign giving at the zip code level, but the correlations are of only moderate strength. The upshot is that a variable reflecting contribution amounts does not simply measure an area’s high income or professional status.
Wording for the survey items used in this study is provided in Appendix A.
The average zip code in 2004, for example, has a mean population of 10,405 and a mean voting age population of 7,055. Zip codes in urban areas generally contain more people than those in rural areas.
Stem cell research is somewhat of a dubious fit in the cosmopolitanism/populism issue category, in any case. Although opinion on this issue is influenced by the grassroots anti-abortion politics of the right, it is also shaped by the politics of medical research and the outreach campaigns of specific disease-treatment focused interests.
The only firearms-relevant question in the 2006 CCES was whether the respondent happened to own a gun (not shown in Fig. 3). Fully 77.6% of those residing in the top campaign contribution neighborhoods reported that they did not own a gun, compared with only 44.3% among those in the lowest contribution bracket.
While the multi-level estimation strategy does involve some modest loss of cases in those locations where zip codes contained a single respondent, we found that the results did not change greatly using the generalized hierarchical model from a standard logistic regression model.
The FEC files very reliably report zip code information on contributors. We were able to minimize the number of missing zip codes by manually searching through the FEC files by name and address, often using complete records for a given contributor to fill in the zip code information for incomplete records for that same contributor. For 2004, we reduced the amount of contributions unattributable to any zip code to 2.6% of the total.
We fully recognize that the inclusion of ideology on the right hand side suggests that liberal-conservative ideology is the ‘cause’ of these issue opinions, rather than issue opinions being a source of liberal-conservative ideology. But our interest here is not to engage the thorny endogeneity issue, but simply to evaluate whether there is a substantive and statistically significant coefficient for contributing neighborhoods, even after we take the self-reported political ideology of the survey respondent into account. The results show that there is.
As a summary estimate of impact, this 47% figure is computed from the estimated change in the probability of favoring support of the sale of RU-486 by moving the amount contributed from its lowest to highest amount, with the values of all other variables in the model held constant at their sample means. Other estimates of impact we discuss throughout the remainder of the text are computed the same way.
Quoted in Manjoo (2005).
References
Agnew, J. A. (1987). Place and politics: The geographical mediation of state and society. Boston: Allen and Unwin.
Apinunmahakul, A., & Devlin, R. A. (2008). Social networks and private philanthropy. Journal of Public Economics, 92, 309–328.
Baybeck, B., & McClurg, S. (2005). What do they know and how do they know it: An examination of citizen awareness of context. American Politics Research, 33(4), 492–520.
Beck, P. A., & Jennings, M. K. (1991). Family traditions, political periods and the development of partisan orientations. Journal of Politics, 53(3), 742–763.
Berelson, B. R., Lazarsfeld, P. F., & McPhee, W. N. (1954). Voting: A study of opinion formation in a presidential election. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Bishop, B. (2008). The big sort: Why the clustering of like-minded America is tearing us apart. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Brady, H. E., Schlozman, K. L., & Verba, S. (1999). Prospecting for participants: Rational expectations and the recruitment of political activists. American Political Science Review, 93(1), 153–168.
Brady, H. E., Verba, S., & Schlozman, K. L. (1995). Beyond SES: A resource model of political participation. American Political Science Review, 89(2), 271–294.
Brown, C., Powell, L., Wilcox, C. (1993). Sex and the political contributor: The gender gap among contributors to presidential candidates in 1988. Political Research Quarterly, 46(3), 355–376.
Brown, C. W., Jr., Powell, L. W., & Wilcox, C. (1995). Serious money: Fundraising and contributing in presidential nomination campaigns. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Cooper, A. (2003, August). Soliciting support: Attracting donors, anticipating the impact of reform. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Philadelphia, PA.
Cuba, L., & Hummon, D. (1993). A place to call home: Identification with dwelling, community, and region. The Sociological Quarterly, 34, 111–131.
Danielson, M. N. (1976). The politics of exclusion. New York: Columbia University Press.
Fischer, C. S. (1975a). Toward a subcultural theory of urbanism. American Journal of Sociology, 80(6), 1319–1341.
Fischer, C. S. (1975b). The effect of urban life on traditional values. Social Forces, 53(3), 420–432.
Fischer, C. S. (1995). The subcultural theory of urbanism: A twentieth-year assessment. American Journal of Sociology, 101(3), 543–577.
Florida, R. (2002). The economic geography of talent. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 92(4), 743–755.
Francia, P. L., Green, J. C., Herrnson, P. S., Powell, L. W., & Wilcox, C. (2003). The financiers of congressional elections. New York: Columbia University Press.
Frank, T. (2010, February 24). What’s the matter with democrats? Wall Street Journal.
Gimpel, J. G., Lay, J. C., & Schuknecht, J. E. (2003). Cultivating democracy: Civic environments and political socialization in America. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.
Gimpel, J. G., & Lee, F. E. (2006). The geography of electioneering: Campaigning for votes and campaigning for money. In M. P. McDonald & J. Samples (Eds.), The marketplace of democracy (pp. 125–148). Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution and Cato Institute.
Gimpel, J. G., Lee, F. E., & Kaminski, J. (2006). The political geography of campaign contributions. Journal of Politics, 68(August), 626–639.
Gimpel, J. G., Lee, F. E., & Pearson-Merkowitz, S. (2008). The check is in the mail: Interdistrict funding flows in congressional elections. American Journal of Political Science, 52(2), 373–394.
Gimpel, J. G., & Schuknecht, J. (2003). Patchwork nation: Sectionalism and political change in American politics. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
Grant, J. T., & Rudolph, T. J. (2002). To give or not to give: Modeling individuals’ contribution decisions. Political Behavior, 24(1), 31–54.
Higley, S. R. (1995). Privilege, power, and place: The geography of the American upper class. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
Hill, S. J., Lo, J., Vavreck, L., & Zaller, J. (2007). The opt-in internet panel: Survey mode, sampling methodology and the implications for political research. University of California, Los Angeles (unpublished manuscript).
Huckfeldt, R., Beck, P. A., Dalton, R. J., & Levine, J. (1995). Political environments, cohesive social groups, and the communication of public opinion. American Journal of Political Science, 39(4), 1025–1054.
Huckfeldt, R., & Sprague, J. (1995). Citizens, politics, and social communication: Information and influence in an election campaign. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Jennings, M. K., & Niemi, R. G. (1968). The transmission of political values from parent to child. American Political Science Review, 62(1), 169–184.
Joe, W. Y., Malbin, M. L., Wilcox, C., Brusoe, P. W., Pimlott, J. P. (2008). Who are the individual donors to gubernatorial and state legislative elections. The Campaign Finance Institute Small Donor Project, Paper Delivered at the Midwest Political Science Annual Meeting, Chicago, IL, April 3–6.
Johnston, R. G. (1991). A question of place: Exploring the practice of human geography. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
King, G. (1996). Why context should not count. Political Geography, 15(2), 159–164.
Laumann, E. O. (1973). Bonds of pluralism: The form and substance of urban social networks. New York, NY: Wiley.
Lindstrom, B. (1997). A sense of place: Housing selection on Chicago’s north shore. The Sociological Quarterly, 38(1), 19–39.
Manjoo, F. (2005, February 25). Bush’s bait and switch. Salon. http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/02/25/sellout/index.html.
Massey, D. S. (1996). The age of extremes: Concentrated affluence and poverty in the twenty-first century. Demography, 33(4), 395–412.
Massey, D. S., & Eggers, M. L. (1993). The spatial concentration of affluence and poverty during the 1970s. Urban Affairs Quarterly, 29(2), 299–315.
Massey, D. S., & Fischer, M. J. (2003). The geography of inequality in the United States, 1950–2000. In W. Gale & J. R. Pack (Eds.), Brookings-Wharton Papers on Urban Affairs. Washington: Brookings Institution.
McClosky, H., & Zaller, J. (1984). The American ethos: Public attitudes toward capitalism and democracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Mosk, M., & Cohen, S. (2008, October 22). Big donors drive Obama’s money edge. Washington Post, A1.
Mutz, D. (2006). Hearing the other side: Deliberative versus participatory democracy. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Niemi, R. G., & Jennings, M. K. (1991). Issues and inheritance in the formation of party identification. American Journal of Political Science, 35(4), 970–988.
Ostrower, F. (1995). Why the wealthy give: The culture of elite philanthropy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. (2008). Liberal dems top conservative reps in donations, activism. Survey Report, October 23. http://people-press.org/report/?pageid=1412.
Putnam, R. D. (1966). Political attitudes and the local community. American Political Science Review, 60, 640–654.
Raudenbush, S. W., & Bryk, A. S. (2002). Hierarchical linear models: Applications and data analysis methods (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Romer, D., Kenski, K., Winneg, K., Adasiewicz, C., & Jamieson, K. H. (2006). Capturing campaign dynamics 2000 & 2004: The National Annenberg Election Survey. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Sirgy, M. J., Grzeskowiak, S., & Su, C. (2005). Explaining housing preference and choice: The role of self-congruity and functional congruity. Journal of Housing and the Built Environment, 20(4), 329–347.
Tuch, S. (1987). Urbanism, region, and tolerance revisited: The case of racial prejudice. American Sociological Review, 52, 504–510.
Verba, S., Schlozman, K. L., & Brady, H. E. (1995). Voice and equality: Civic voluntarism in American politics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Wilson, T. C. (1991). Urbanism, migration, and tolerance: A reassessment. American Sociological Review, 56(1), 117–123.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Appendices
Appendix A
See Table 6.
Appendix B
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Bramlett, B.H., Gimpel, J.G. & Lee, F.E. The Political Ecology of Opinion in Big-Donor Neighborhoods. Polit Behav 33, 565–600 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-010-9144-7
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-010-9144-7