Article summary
Political campaigns increasingly run experiments to learn what persuades voters, but the consequences for elections and democratic influence remain unclear.
Political campaigns increasingly run experiments to learn what persuades voters, but the consequences for elections and democratic influence remain unclear.
This article examines the relationship between candidate visits and campaign donations during the turbulent 2016 US Presidential Election. Using original survey data collected from voters across battleground states, we analyze how face-to-face interactions influenced donation behavior.
Contemporary right-skewed wealth distributions produce similarly skewed pools of campaign resources, which means that increased pressures to spend on campaigns disproportionately benefit very wealthy candidates. The paper develops a theory explaining how those financing pressures translate into advantages for the very rich and identifies several conditions that determine how large those advantages become and at whose expense they accrue.
This article asks how police union campaign spending shapes local politics and public safety outcomes by assembling a large new dataset on U.S. mayoral campaign finance and linking endorsements to later departmental outcomes. The authors contribute a broad descriptive account of police-union donations across cities and use a within-city research design that accounts for staggered timing to estimate the association between electing police-union-backed mayors and subsequent police resources and performance.
Women face a 'gendered pipeline' barrier to power, but the reasons are complex. We analyzed three candidate pools: lower-level officeholders, newspaper-nominated candidates, and lawyers with political contributions.
Concerns that interest groups distort democracy with campaign money are longstanding. Yet, only 5% of U.S. publicly traded firms contribute at all.
This article introduces a new supervised machine learning approach that links campaign contributions directly to roll call voting behavior. Unlike unsupervised methods, it maps donation patterns onto actual legislative votes.
New research challenges conventional wisdom about public campaign finance promoting candidate socioeconomic diversity.
This article introduces a comprehensive source for gubernatorial campaign finance data spanning the U.S. from 1977 to 2001.