Persuasion, Identities, and Campaign Donations

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

The money used in U.S. election campaigns has almost doubled during the four years between the 2016 and 2020 election cycles. This meteoric rise in campaign spending also means that individuals are now contributing to campaigns in record numbers. Does this change what we know about individual donors? Why do donors contribute to political campaigns, and how do campaigns use what they know to their advantage to persuade donors to open their wallets? The first two papers in this panel encompass research on donor motivations, and the second two papers approach the questions from the campaign's perspective.

Karen Cyphers, Hans Hassell, and Kai Ou, in Partisan and Racial Motivations for Campaign Giving: Evidence from a Field Experiment, presents groundbreaking results on how identities affect campaign donations. How do social and political identities affect donation and voting behavior? Using a randomized field experiment, they identify the effects of information about the donation behavior of other voters who shared the same identity, either partisan or racial. The paper finds that the treatment information of donors who have the same party affiliation significantly promotes donation. In contrast, the information of donors who come from the same racial groups has only a mild effect compared to the control. The authors also find significant variation by racial group, noting that for minorities, information about the behavior of others in their racial group is as powerful or more powerful than information about co-partisan behavior.

Jay Goodliffe, in The Changing Population of Donors, presents a longitudinal study on how a non-donor can evolve to a small donor and eventually to a big donor---or stops giving, i.e., becomes a lapsed donor. Using latent class analysis and latent profile analysis, Goodliffe classifies donors (and non-donors) into different types according to their donation behavior and how much they donate. The paper then use latent transition analysis (i.e., hidden Markov models) to analyze when donors move from one donor type to another type: for example, when a presidential donor starts donating to congressional campaigns, or when a party donor stops donating altogether. Using a panel survey of US citizens, the author examines the characteristics and motivations of new donors, continuing donors, and lapsed donors.

Seo-young Silvia Kim, Jan Zilinsky, and Brian Brew, in Donate To Help Us Fight Back: Persuasion Rhetoric in Political Fundraising, analyze how campaigns use different messages to target the financial electorate as opposed to the voting electorate. Fundraising appeals can potentially appeal to different emotions, issues, and ideological stances than appeals for turnout and vote choice, allowing insights into how campaigns form their strategies. Using data from Facebook Ad Library's pages of congressional candidates for the 2020 general election, Kim, Zilinsky, and Brew distinguish persuasion for donations and votes and identify how campaigns employ different messages for different recipients using text analysis. The authors also analyze how fundraising appeals vary by party, with additional text data from official campaign websites and major fundraising platforms. They find that the language employed by Republican candidates and committees is associated with stronger sentiments such as anger and disgust, with potential implications for demobilization and democracy.

Finally, in Communicating with Donors and Voters Online: How the Incentives of Small-Donor Fundraising Obscure Candidate Positioning, Eric Manning uses official emails from campaigns to analyze how online political communications from campaigns vary by message purpose and audience and the implications for potential donors and voters. As online fundraising grows in importance, email messaging has become increasingly sophisticated, and email lists more valuable assets. Based on campaign emails from 2018--2020 congressional candidates, Manning examines when and how campaigns engage potential donors using issue-based messaging. I find that competitive candidates appealing mainly to potential donors are more negative and less issue-focused than candidates in safer seats. The findings highlight the mechanism by which increasing reliance on small-donor and nationalized online fundraising challenges the ability of potential donors to finance ideologically-congruent candidates. They also demonstrate how such fundraising creates negative externalities for voting non-donors.

Sub Unit

• Division 35: Political Organizations and Parties

Cosponsor

• Related Groups / Campaign Finance Research Group

Individual Presentations

• Partisan and Racial Motivations for Campaign Giving - Karen Deborah Halperin Cyphers; Hans J.G. Hassell, Florida State University; Kai Ou, Florida State University

• The Changing Population of Donors - Jay Goodliffe, Brigham Young University

• Donate to Help Us Fight Back: Persuasion Rhetoric in Political Fundraising - Seo-young Silvia Kim, American University; Jan Zilinsky, Technical University of Munich; Brian Michael Brew, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

• Communicating with Donors and Voters Online - Eric Manning, Princeton University

Chair

• Paul S. Herrnson University of Connecticut

Discussant

• Jake M Grumbach Princeton University