Fundraising and Legislating in the U.S. Congress

• In Event: The Causes and Consequences of Lawmaking Effectiveness in Congress (Pre-Recorded)

Abstract

This paper explores representational tradeoffs between dialing for dollars and passing legislation. I draw on primary and general election fundraising totals for all U.S. House members from 1980 to 2020 to examine whether the top fundraisers are also the most effective lawmakers or whether one of these roles ultimately gives. The variation in campaign receipts is notable, with some rank-and-file members raising tens of millions of dollars and others raising hundreds of thousands, and fundraising success is not simply a reflection of electoral vulnerability. The data are merged with Volden and Wiseman’s (2014) Legislative Effectiveness Scores (LES) and Stewart and Woon’s (2017) data on committee assignments to capture legislative productivity within and across committees. I find that members who excel at fundraising have lower LES scores, on average, and they underperform their colleagues who sit on the same committees. The top fundraisers are also more likely to secure a seat on a power committee than those who raise less, which offers a partial explanation for their lower averages, but the within-committee effects remain. I leverage additional within-member variation over time to show how the pressure to fundraise impacts legislative effectiveness. The findings have important implications for our understanding of declining congressional capacity as fundraising demands continue to increase.

Author

• Danielle Thomsen, University of California, Irvine