Are Donations Strategic or Expressive? Evidence from a Survey of Verified Donors

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Abstract

Do donors give primarily to express their personal policy positions or to help their party win elections? The answer to this question matters for the extent to which campaign contributors are responsible for creating a polarized political environment, or merely responding to it. The strong correlation between policy positions of donors and candidates has been widely documented, but the strategic nature of both campaign contributions and candidate positioning makes it difficult to determine the relative importance of policy positions and partisan victory in donors' calculi. Using a survey of 7,000 verified donors, we estimate the importance of policy positions versus electoral considerations with both direct questions and experimental vignettes. The results reveal considerable heterogeneity across donors based on partisanship, ideology, and the type of contest being considered. Policy extremists are not always the most likely to value candidates' positions -- particularly among Democratic donors and in a general election context. In addition to casting doubt upon donors' responsibility for increasingly polarized candidates, the findings raise important questions about contribution-based ideological measures which assume that donors give expressively and uniformly based on their personal policy preferences.

Authors

• Mellissa Meisels, Vanderbilt University

• Joshua D. Clinton, Vanderbilt University

• Gregory Huber, Yale University