Abstract
Non-constituent donors constitute an increasingly important fundraising base for members of the U.S. House. These donors are theorized to be seeking “surrogate representation” by buying additional representation rather than relying solely upon representation provided by their own House members. However, precisely why they contribute in this way remains unclear. Using data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Studies (CCES) 2008–2014 in a series of logistic models, I investigate whether self-reported donors make contributions to House races outside of their home states for policy or partisan reasons. I uncover evidence that surrogate seekers make their out-of-state contributions to recover partisan representation and to gain additional partisan and policy representation. Further, conservative issue stances significantly increase the likelihood of out-of-state giving more so than liberal stances suggesting conservative donors have less difficulty identifying surrogate representatives. Taken together, the results suggest surrogate seekers are strategic and politically sophisticated with respect to their giving choices and motivations.
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Notes
While this practice is increasingly the norm, it is not new. Grenzke (1988) first examined this fundraising tendency using a set of House members from the 1977–1982 election cycles. The most recent study to date is by Harry Stevens and Alexi McCammond (2018), who are staff at Axios: https://www.axios.com/house-campaign-contributions-outside-money-f776be9e-f74b-4834-8ff4-ae30df1f7c61.html.
Some of these shared interests are reflected in the caucus structures in Congress, such as the border caucuses (Mimms 2014).
These are the original sources of the publicly available CCES survey data: Ansolabehere and Pettigrew (2014) "Cumulative CCES Common Content (2006–2012)", https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/26451, Harvard Dataverse, Version 5.0, UNF:5:rXSA73aoDi28uu + IOg7DEg == [fileUNF]; Schaffner and Ansolabehere 2015, "CCES Common Content, 2014", https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/XFXJVY, Harvard Dataverse, Version 4.0, UNF:6:WvvlTX + E+iNraxwbaWNVdg == [fileUNF]. Command files and supplemental data files are available via the author’s page on Santa Clara University’s open-access institutional research repository, Scholar Commons: https://works.bepress.com/anne-baker/.
Using the option “subpop” in Stata, the models that are run are restricted to the specified donor population but the standard errors are calculated based upon the entire survey sample.
The 2014 CCES poses questions about abortion and gun control as a battery of questions with different response options than the previous surveys. A question on affirmative action is not included in the 2014 CCES. There also is no climate change question but a battery of questions about different environmental policies. Thus, these changes prohibited pooling of these data with previous CCES data.
See similarly constructed scale in Rhodes et al. (2016).
All calculations of predicted probabilities are done using margins in Stata 14, following the observed-value approach (Hanmer and Kalkan 2013); after setting a few variables of interest to specific representative values, adjusted predictions are calculated using the observed values for each observation in the entire subpopulation of donors in the sample and then the average predicted probabilities for the donor population in the sample are calculated and reported rather than the probabilities for a hypothetical average donor within the sample.
As a baseline test, I interacted my policy variables (discussed above) with a dummy variable identifying a mismatch between the donor’s partisanship and their House incumbent’s partisanship (also discussed above). None of the interaction terms were significant.
Those who support defense spending cuts as their most preferred budget balancing option are also not significantly likely to give to either Senate candidates in their state or in other states. Cuts to defense spending, unlike domestic spending cuts, are generally not a separate platform issue for candidates. Thus, the liberal position on this question makes it harder to measure institutional motivations. The true liberal position would be to prefer greater spending on important domestic programs but that is not how the CCES structures these questions.
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This research was funded by a grant from the Banann Institute at Santa Clara University.
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Baker, A.E. The Partisan and Policy Motivations of Political Donors Seeking Surrogate Representation in House Elections. Polit Behav 42, 1035–1054 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-019-09531-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-019-09531-2