Money and Ideology: Evidence from French Parliamentary Elections

• In Event: Campaign Contributions

Abstract

Do campaign contributions influence political discourse? This paper studies the impact of private donations on the content of campaign messages issued by individual candidates in the French Parliamentary elections. We construct a novel dataset that combines data on the amount and source of the donations received by all the candidates, as well as the content of their campaign manifestos. First, we document the sources of campaign contributions received by politicians at a very fine-grained level, and analyze the candidate-level determinants of corporate and individual donations. We collect detailed data on campaign revenues for 11,000 candidates who ran in either 1993 or 1997 - including 1,500 politicians who ran in both years. Particularly, we collect new data on corporate donations received by candidates in 1993, that include the identity of the donor. We digitize the original data from the official reports on election campaign costs and expenditures published by the French campaign regulation agency (CNCCFP). Next, we examine whether these contributions influence electoral messages and whether this effect depends on the identity of the donors. Our dataset contains about 10,000 candidate manifestos issued before each election round of the 1988 and 1993 French legislative elections (assembled in Le Pennec 2019) and 6,000 manifestos issued before the 1997 election, which we gathered from the National Archives and digitized for this project. Using various tools of computational text analysis, we construct measures of discourse partisanship on the left-right scale in both election rounds and estimate the causal impact of corporate donations on these measures. To control for the endogeneity of donations, we exploit the 1995 ban on corporate donations and adopt a difference-in-differences strategy to estimate the impact of receiving money from private firms in 1993. Our preliminary findings suggest that corporate donations concentrate in more competitive districts, and that receiving such donations increases a candidate's probability of qualifying for the second election round and - conditional on actually running in the second round - raises the candidate's tendency to moderate her discourse and issue a more ideologically neutral message in the runoff. This result suggests that allowing corporate donors to finance electoral campaigns tends to raise competition by either incentivizing or enabling weaker candidates to run more strategic campaigns and adjust their electoral discourse to appeal to a broader range of voters.

Authors

• Caroline Le Pennec, HEC Montreal

• Julia Cagé, Harvard University