Influence Of Campaign Contributions On Voting Behaviour

Assignment 3.

The theory that campaign contributions influence voting behaviour enjoys the support of several studies throughout political literature. Numerous studies have examined the relationship between campaign contributions and their consequent effect on congressional voting and finally, policy outcomes (Austen-Smith, 1987; Chappell, 1982; Wawro, 2001). Previous literature has explained the impact of interest groups’ campaign contributions on voting behaviour and found a positive correlation between donations by interest groups and voting for policies in their favour. The probabilistic voting impact of campaign contributions have also been explored to predict future voting behaviour. However, most studies only consider the impact of interest groups’ contributions and PAC donations and most are conducted from the perspective of firm’s donations. There is a gap in literature to explain the importance of individual contributions and their influence on potential voting behaviour of the candidate and policy outcomes. There are very limited number of studies that define the importance of individual campaign contributions in general and none, to the extent of my knowledge, that examine the impact of distribution of individual level contributions spatially and its’ consequent impact on roll-call votes. The closest study that relates to the geographical importance of individual contributions studies spatial proximity’s importance in organizing and donating to a candidate due to common material interests in policy (Gimpel, Lee and Kaminski, 2006). But even this does not explain whether there is an impact of spatial distribution of donations on voting behaviour. This previous study looked at the distribution of donations for Democratic and Republican candidates and put forward the results that geographic context plays a major role in affecting solidary motives for donating (Gimpel, Lee and Kaminski, 2006). This however provided implications for only campaign trails and none to study voting behaviour on policies. This research paper will attempt to study the variance in voting behaviour within the same party’s candidates (to eliminate the role of party ideology) by examining the spatial distribution of individual donations across states. Ideally, the voting behaviour on economic policies would be examined as most representatives hail from a business background as per the statistics1, and research has shown that candidates that come from profit-oriented backgrounds i.e. businesses have most active voting behaviour when it comes to economic policies (CARNES, 2012).

Bibliography:

1. Austen-Smith, D. (1987). Interest groups, campaign contributions, and probabilistic voting. Public Choice, 54(2), pp.123-139.
2. Chappell, H. (1982). Campaign Contributions and Congressional Voting: A Simultaneous Probit-Tobit Model. The Review of Economics and Statistics, 64(1), p.77.
3. Wawro, G. (2001). A Panel Probit Analysis of Campaign Contributions and Roll-Call Votes. American Journal of Political Science, 45(3), p.563.
4. Gimpel, J., Lee, F. and Kaminski, J. (2006). The Political Geography of Campaign Contributions in American Politics. The Journal of Politics, 68(3), pp.626-639.
5. Brookings.edu. (2017). Prior Occupations of Representatives. [online] Available at: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/vitalstats_ch1_tbl8.pdf [Accessed 22 Feb. 2019].
6. CARNES, N. (2012). Does the Numerical Underrepresentation of the Working Class in Congress Matter?. Legislative Studies Quarterly, 37(1), pp.5-34.. https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/vitalstats_ch1_tbl8.pdf