Abstract
Campaign finance research has given greater attention to race and gender, but, due to data limitations, only separately. Using new data on the ethnoracial and gender backgrounds of contributors, we provide the first estimates of the ethnorace-gender distribution of campaign contributions. We find that women of color are more underrepresented in campaign finance than predicted by existing analyses of race or gender alone. We also use within-district variation to compare how candidate race, gender, and their interaction affect the race and gender distributions of campaign contributions. We find that the effect of shared ethnorace is many times larger than that of shared gender or their interaction. Gender effects are heterogeneous by ethnorace and party; shared gender is most predictive for contributions from white and black Democratic women. The findings suggest a need for greater attention to intersectionality in research on political participation.
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Data Availability
Replication data is available at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/QWVACY.
Change history
10 March 2021
A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-021-09693-y
Notes
We use ethnorace as a composite concept of race and ethnicity (Omi and Winant 2014).
Indeed, the interaction of race and gender among voters and candidates has been a theme of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary. Kamala Harris and other candidates described black women as the “backbone of the Democratic Party.” At a December, 2019 debate, Andrew Yang criticized campaign finance rules by saying that women’s lower incomes make them less able to donate to campaigns, and thus less represented.
While the variation across districts and elections makes House elections especially amenable to test these questions, gender and race may operate differently in other election contexts, such as presidential, state legislative, or local elections.
Kitchens and Swers (2016) investigate gender and partisan differences in primary election fundraising. Of note, they find that female Democratic candidates raise more in primary elections than do male Democratic candidates. Hassell and Visalvanich (2019) similarly find that white Democratic women receive greater funds from party organizations and insiders.
First applied to African Americans (Dawson 1994), later work applies linked fate to the political behavior of Asian Americans (e.g. Junn and Masouka 2008), Latinos (e.g., McConnaughy et al. 2012), and whites (Schildkraut 2017; see also Jardina 2019). Importantly, however, linked fate is not necessarily correlated with with group consciousness (Gay and Tate 1998; Sanchez and Vargas 2016).
The potential for coethnic and co-gendered contributing may be greater than for voting, because while voters are confined to voting for a House candidate in their district only—and many districts rarely if ever have a major party candidate of color or female candidate—they can donate to any candidate across the country.
We focus on heterosexual marriage. We found no political science research on the relationship between same-sex marriage status and gender-based political behavior.
Bolzandahl and Myers (2004) find that single women who rely on their own income are more supportive than married women of feminist policy issues affecting all women, and Zuo and Tang (2000) find that married women are generally less concerned about gender discrimination.
Political socialization through the party system may also explain ethnoracial differences in participation (Hajnal and Lee 2011), though there has been little direct intersectional race-gender analysis on this question.
Gay and Tate (1998) argue that black women are “doubly bound,” perceiving greater linked fate in terms of both race and gender due to the multiplicity of the identity dimensions in which they experience marginalization.
Marriage may, again, mediate the effect of shared gender identity across ethnoracial groups. Stout et al. (2017), for example, find that white and Latina women who are married have significantly lower levels of gender-based linked fate than single women, but this marriage effect does not affect black women. (Unlike the expectations put forth in Gay and Tate (1998), however, they find that single black women do not report higher levels of gender-based linked fate than do married black women.) Such studies illustrate the importance of exploring variation in degrees of gender-based linked fate, particularly at the intersection of race and gender.
In addition, Democratic elites in recent years have invoked intersectionality theory in their communication. Kirsten Gillibrand tweeted in 2018 that “The Future is Female…Intersectional.” A 2018 Politico article described expectations about future Democratic campaigns: “Get ready to hear a lot more about intersectionality.”.
The Grumbach and Sahn (2019) data include the 2012 election cycle, but we exclude 2012 because the cycle’s data do not include candidate gender.
The DIME dataset compiles data from the Federal Election Commission (FEC), the Sunlight Foundation, and the National Institute for Money in State Politics. The DIME data includes the universe of itemized donations. Donations of $200 or more are required to be itemized, but smaller contributions may also be voluntarily itemized and appear in the data. It is plausible that the distribution of small, un-itemized contributions is more diverse in race and gender. In addition, if small donors are more likely than larger donors to contribute based on shared identity, our results may understate co-ethnic and co-gendered contributing.
This follows the methodology of Goggin (2017), which provides the ethnoracial identities for candidates in the 2008 and 2010 cycles.
There are other potential sources of systematic error in donor race estimates. Interracial marriages in which women change surnames could make women’s race predictions less precise than men’s, though we do not observe large gender differences in the precisions of race estimates in the data. Overall, we do not believe these sources of bias are great enough to affect the substance of the descriptive or causal conclusions.
Candidate covariates are from the DIME dataset, and district covariates are from the U.S. Census (ICPSR 8091, 8903).
The difference-in-difference design is most appropriate for estimating the treatment effect of general election nominee identity on general election contributions as many primary elections are formally or de facto uncontested.
As a robustness check, we provide estimates in which we subset to non-incumbent candidates in Appendix Table A5.
Because we wish to facilitate the interpretation of relationships between discrete combinations of candidate ethnoracial and gender identities, we treat them each race-gender combination “as a single variable” with white men as the omitted identity combination (Gill 2001, p. 2). In Appendix Section A4 we provide alternative interaction model specification with ordinary constituent and interaction terms (i.e., ethnorace indicator, gender indicator, and ethnorace × gender indicator). The results are nearly identical.
This includes Asian, black, Hispanic, American Indian or Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, or individuals of two or more races.
We provide cross-sectional analysis with similar results in Appendix Section A.5.
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Acknowledgements
We thank participants at APSA 2019, MPSA 2019, WPSA 2019, and the Princeton REI Workshop. We thank three anonymous reviewers for extremely helpful comments. All remaining errors are our own.
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Grumbach, J.M., Sahn, A. & Staszak, S. Gender, Race, and Intersectionality in Campaign Finance. Polit Behav 44, 319–340 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-020-09619-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-020-09619-0