Politics and Congress
Members of Congress are Listening to Out-of-District Donors
New research shows members respond to the preferences of their national donors
Fundraising is a central activity for members of Congress, and members increasingly seek donations from people outside their districts. The median House incumbent received 42% of itemized individual donations from outside their district in 1990, rising to 72% in 2010. In other words, there is an increasingly important national donor pool for each party that contributes to members regardless of district boundaries.
In our upcoming article in Legislative Studies Quarterly, Brandice Canes-Wrone and I investigate how the policy preferences of these national donors influence policymaking. What we discover is campaign contributors skew votes in favor of a class of national donors.
We find this by drawing together measures of fundraising, member characteristics, and survey data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Studies from 2006 through 2016 that ask respondents’ preferences on numerous issues that were addressed by Congress that year. These surveys feature large enough samples that allow us to estimate opinion of each party’s national donor base, the opinion within members’ districts, and the position of each member’s partisan constituency in his or her district. We match these measures to 26 roll call votes in the House from the 109th through 114th Congresses on minimum wage, bank and housing bailouts, Obamacare and Obamacare repeal, stem cell research, “Don’t ask, don’t tell” repeal, several free trade agreements, and more.
In all, our analysis includes 9,921 votes cast by 780 unique members across six Congresses.
For nearly a third of the observations in our data the members are caught between voting with the majority opinion of the general electorate in their district versus the majority opinion of the national donor pool of their party. When members face this cross-pressure, they resoundingly side with donors, voting with national donor opinion 81% of the time (see table, below).
In six percent of the roll call votes in our data (N=600), national donor opinion diverged from both district opinion and opinion of the member’s co-partisans in the district — that is, the opinion of Democratic voters in the district of a Democratic member or the opinion of Republican voters in the district of a Republican member. Even in these cases, members voted with donor opinion 66% of the time. It appears, then, the opinion of the national donor base has a stronger pull on members than does their general or primary election constituencies.
We push on the influence of national donor opinion using a variety of models to control for other factors we expect also influence members’ voting behavior: the opinion of the member’s constituents, the partisan sub-constituency in the district, opinion of in-district donors, opinion of affluent voters, the year (to capture shifts in the legislative agenda), and party of the member. We find that as the national donor base of the member’s party moves in a liberal or conservative direction on an issue by 10 percentage points, the member’s probability of casting a vote on that issue in line with national donor opinion rises by 8 points.
All members need to raise money to meet their party dues and members who raise more have better chances at more favorable committee assignments and party leadership roles. This fundraising imperative incentivizes all members to stay in the good graces of the national donor pool of their party. But responsiveness to national donors should not be an equally easy or hard choice for each member. We expect that members in safer seats should be more responsive to national donor opinion because roll call votes against the preferences of the voters in their districts are not as hazardous to reelection chances for members in safer seats versus for members from less favorable districts.
To test the district safety expectation, we account for the safety of a member’s district (measured using Cook Partisan Voting Index) and find that as the electoral favorability of a member’s seat increases, the member is increasingly responsive to the policy preferences of national donors. What’s more, we take advantage of redistricting to observe how the sudden shifts in district safety influence individual members’ roll call behavior. These results also show that as seat safety increases, representatives’ responsiveness to district opinion declines.
Finally, if we are right that members are responsive to the opinion of their national donors, we expect to see that members who get more of their campaign donations from outside their districts are more responsive to national donor opinion than are colleagues who get more of their individual donations from inside the district. Indeed, we find that the greater the proportion of a representative’s itemized individual donations from outside their district, the more likely he or she is to vote with the preferences of the national pool of his or her party’s contributors.
These results support the argument that polarization would decline if parties could directly raise and distribute more funding, at least on issues over which donors have more disparate views than voters. What’s more, our findings suggest that redistricting of partisans into more homogenous districts, by making seats less competitive in general elections, can increase the impact of national donors.
Overall, we show that individual donors skew votes in the House towards a national donor class that, relative to the voting population, is wealthier, older, has a higher proportion of males, and a higher proportion of non-minorities. Yes, district opinion still matters. But in our analyses the importance of district opinion is no greater than that of national donor opinion and is even less influential on members in some of our analyses. And as seat safety increases, the impact of national donor opinion grows while that of district opinion declines. In sum, the results show how current fundraising incentives to cater to national donors shape representation and policymaking.
