Beyond ``Bernie Bros'' and CEOs: An empirical profile of the political donor

• In Event: 2229 - Section on Political Sociology Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Political Sociology Refereed Roundtable #5

Abstract

This paper challenges the notion of the ``elite'' political donor. Using survey data, I show that campaign contributions are actually more of a mass than elite form of political participation. The median donor gives roughly $100, but socioeconomic differences between ``large'' and ``small''-dollar donors only emerge when one divides those two groups based on total annual donations of $1,000 or more. Finally, education has a stronger association with giving than income. Incorporating administrative data on campaign finance records that include small-dollar donors, I show that both sets of donors persistently participate over multiple elections. I argue that this requires a fundamental re-orientation to campaign finance in studies of electoral politics. Relative to voting, campaign giving offers far more opportunities to participate in partisan politics at only marginally greater cost. While affluent and less-affluent people both give money, the affluent experience this form of political participation in a qualitatively different way. Scholars have begun to study ways in which elites experience political giving, and their consequences for party structure. I show that, because campaign giving is a far more common activity than some literature would suggest, understanding the non-elite experience of political giving is just as important.

Author

• Nicholas Clark Judd, University of Chicago