The Effects of Out-of-District Donors on Position Taking in the U.S. House

• In Event: Money and Congressional Elections

Abstract

Congressional scholarship theorizes that members of Congress build support inside their district to win reelection. However, the costs of contemporary campaigns require members to raise enormous sums of money, forcing them to rely heavily on out-of-district contributions. Fundraising outside the district creates a competing principals problem, where members must represent out-of-district donors and/or constituents to win reelection. I argue that donors, not constituents, have a greater capacity to punish members for ideological deviations. Thus, members should represent out-of-district donors over constituents (leading to agency loss) if two assumptions hold: 1) members rely on out-of-district donors to fund their campaigns, and 2) constituents and out-of-district donors have distinct ideological positions. Using extensive data on House members’ reelection fundraising, I show that members raise more than 8 out of every 10 dollars outside their district, and out-of-district donors’ ideological preferences are distinct from in-district donors’ ideology. Using redistricting as an exogenous shock to the ideological preferences of members’ in-district constituency, I find that greater displacement of in-district donors leads members to rely more on out-of-district contributions and positions themselves closer in ideological proximity to out-of-district donors than constituents. House members’ efforts to tailor position-taking to attract out-of-district donors at the expense of constituents raise important concerns about the role of money in politics and the quality of democratic representation.

Author

• Sharif Amlani, University of California, Davis