The Democratizing and Polarizing Impact of Fundraising on Twitter

• In Event: Money and Congressional Elections

Abstract

Social media offers candidates relatively inexpensive tools to attempt to reach different audiences, each of which may offer potential benefits to campaigns as they seek to achieve their political goals. Twitter offers a place where campaigns can reach political elites, such as other campaigns or journalists, as well as individuals nationwide. Though these audiences cannot necessarily vote for a candidate, they can show their support for a campaign in other ways, including by spreading their tweets and making donations. In this paper we pair tweets by congressional candidates who ran for the House in 2020 with transaction-level, daily contributions that they received from individuals both in and out of their state. These allow us to test both for a direct link between the most extreme, viral tweets and corresponding contributions from those outside of a candidate’s district, as well as the indirect link between national news coverage of these tweets and additional contributions. For challengers, this offers them an opportunity to build up resources and support, which they can then use to campaign within their district, with minimal start-up cost. This can lower the barrier of entry of challengers, increasing the economic diversity of the challenger pool. However, if Twitter incentivizes politicians to become more outwardly extreme to appeal to national, partisan individuals, this may be one factor leading to increased growth in polarization in American politics today.

Authors

• Maggie Macdonald, New York University

• Joshua A. Tucker, New York University

• Jonathan Nagler, New York University