Do Interest Groups Contributions Have a Gender Bias?

• In Event: Playing Nicely with Others?: Gender, Cooperation, and Collaboration

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. The number of women in the House of Representatives increased from 106 in 2017 to 127 in 2019 - an increase by almost 20% - and EMILY's List was a major player supporting those (almost exclusively Democratic)newcomers to the House.
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). Previous research has shown that women candidates have a harder time accessing party donor network. 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, all else being equal. If however women candidates' over-all fundraising success looks comparable to men's because it is bolstered by additional support from ideology-oriented women's groups, then dividing donors by group type should reveal gender differences for at least some types of access-oriented donors.
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. Preliminary results show a gender bias in several industry donation patterns. Six out of the ten industry sectors analyzed display a statistically significant difference between the donations to male and female members of Congress.

Authors

• Regina Wagner, University of Alabama

• Ruoxi Li, California State University, San Marcos