Do Interest Groups Contributions Have a Gender Bias?

• In Event: Please Send Money: The Gender Gap in Campaign Finance

Abstract

The year 2018 witnessed a surge of women candidates running and winning congressional offices, most of whom demonstrated remarkable fundraising abilities especially from female donor network groups such as EMILY’s list. This observation is consistent with the scholarly wisdom that women candidates perform as well as men in terms of total amount of campaign fundraising (Uhlaner & Schlozman, 1986; Burrell, 2014), and their fundraising efforts were strongly supported by women donors, especially Democratic women donors and groups (Francia, 2001; Crespin & Deitz, 2010; Thomsen & Swers, 2017).

To therefore conclude that there is not a gender bias in campaign contributions is however problematic, because ideology-oriented groups behave differently compared to access-oriented groups. Ideology groups such as EMILY’s list focus on candidacy, which is to encourage their preferred candidates running for office, whereas access groups, mostly businesses and business associations, focus on electoral success, which is to back the likely winner (Fouirnaies & Hall, 2014). The fact that female donor network groups provide strong support for women candidates may in fact mask a gender bias in campaign contributions. If women faced no gender bias in campaign contributions and received additional support from women’s groups, all else being equal, women candidates should outperform men in campaign fundraising.

In our paper, we uncover whether or not there is a gender bias in campaign contributions by making a distinction of contributing groups’ types. We hypothesize that, if there is no gender bias in campaign contributions, women candidates should receive comparable amount from access-oriented groups. Using an original dataset on congressional candidates and campaign contributions from 2010 to 2016, we examine how candidate gender, quality, incumbency status, and additional characteristics affect campaign contributions from different types of interest groups while controlling for district characteristics.

Authors

• Ruoxi Li, California State University, San Marcos

• Regina Wagner, University of Alabama