Campaign Contributions in Installments and Post-Election Access-Seeking

• In Event: Candidacies, Campaigns, and Behavior in the American Context

Abstract

Campaign contributions are a mixture of consumption (sincere expressions of donors' wishes for election results) and investment (strategic decisions by donors in the hope to reap future returns to having supported winning candidates). By examining the recipients of contributions, existing studies have shown that different types of donors approach this act of political participation differently. In this paper, I highlight a specific behavior that existing research has paid little attention to: Oftentimes individual and organizational donors opt to make repeated contributions to a candidate even within the same election cycle instead of making a one-time lump-sum contribution. I theorize that strategic donors make contributions in temporally spread-out installments at least partially to continually optimize an "investment portfolio" of candidates according to their evolving chances of winning. To test this theory, I analyze contributions made by lobbyists representing foreign entities in the U.S. government over the last two decades, as well as by their firms. Linking campaign contributions to records of access-seeking to government officials listed in lobbying reports, preliminary evidence shows that the decision to contribute in installments rather than in lump sums is positively related to access-seeking after elections. This finding highlights repeated contributions as a tactic for strategic donors to allocate political funds across candidates and time to maximize political payoffs.

Author

• Huchen Liu, Princeton University