Are campaign contributions perceived as a civic duty?

ABSTRACT

In this article, we examine the extent to which Americans view contributing money to political campaigns as a civic duty. Using data from an original survey (N = 1,269), we find that roughly 15% of the public thinks that for anyone who can afford to contribute, it is a civic duty to contribute financially to political campaigns. Interestingly, we find that there is very little relationship between the sense of duty to vote and the sense of duty to contribute to campaigns. We also develop statistical models to explain individuals’ views about the duty to contribute money to campaigns and compare the results to the determinants of the sense of duty to vote. We find that men, younger people, and those who follow the news closely are more likely than their counterparts to see contributing as a civic duty.

KEYWORDS:

• Civic duty
• campaign contributions
• civic obligation
• donation

Highlights

• Roughly 15% of the American public thinks that for anyone who can afford to contribute, it is a civic duty to contribute financially to political campaigns.

• There is very little relationship between the sense of duty to vote and the sense of duty to contribute to campaigns.

• Men, younger people, and those who follow the news closely are more likely than their counterparts to see contributing as a civic duty.

Notes

¹ In the field of personality psychology, some researchers have noted that dutifulness is a component of the Big Five trait Conscientiousness. However, recent research suggests that Conscientiousness and civic duty are distinct items. For additional details on this point see footnote 17 in Weinschenk and Dawes (2018). In addition, as Blais and Labbe´-St-Vincent (2011) note, “Political attitudes differ from personality traits in two respects. First, they refer to an organized set of views whereas personality refers to a disposition to react in certain ways. Second, they pertain to politics whereas personality applies to all realms of life” (p. 414).

² Given that few studies have focused specifically on the sense of civic duty to donate to campaigns, we are not aware of research that has linked this attitude to the propensity to donate to campaigns. Importantly, though, we were able to identify a data source, the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES), that allows us to examine one possible effect of the sense of duty to donate. In the 2016 CCES, campaign donors were asked a question about the duty to make donations if one is financially able to do so. Of course, because the question was asked of donors, we cannot use it to predict whether a respondent donated or not. However, the CCES did include a measure of how much money donors contributed to candidates and committees. Our expectation is that among donors those who have a stronger sense that donating is a duty will make larger donations than their counterparts. The results of a regression model using the sense of duty to donate to predict the amount of money donated is presented in the Online Appendix. Even the presence of a host of controls, the sense of duty has a positive and statistically significant effect on the amount of money donated. Those who believe that donating is a civic duty donate more money than those who do not. Thus, this provide some evidence that the sense of duty to donate is related to donation behavior.

³ We note that contributing to a political campaign is not something universal. Indeed, electoral systems across the world limit private contributions depending on the existence (or absence) of public funding. Thus, the fact that political parties from many countries in the world are also (or only) publicly funded likely affects the perception of private donations as a civic duty. Although this article focuses on the United States, we encourage future studies in other contexts.

⁴ See this report for details on disparities: https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2016/06/27/1-demographic-trends-and-economic-well-being/

⁵ Census data used in this section can be found at the following links: https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045218 https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2019/demo/educational-attainment/cps-detailed-tables. html https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045218

https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2019/06/median-age-does-not-tell-the-whole-story. html

⁶ Blais and Achen (2019) have pointed out that agree/disagree statements can suffer from acquiescence bias. We

acknowledge this as a limitation but believe that we can still learn from the questions used in this study. It is worth noting that we used the contributions measure described here because we replicated the item from previous studies. For example, the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Study included the same measure that we use here. We also acknowledge that the questions we use are not exactly equivalent. For example, contributing is conditioned on financial ability (while voting is not). Importantly, we note that barriers to giving have dropped considerably in the era of online giving. And many donors now give in small amounts (Magleby et al., 2018; Panagopoulos & Bergan, 2006).

⁷ We note that as a robustness check, we also estimated the models using multinomial logit (with strongly and

somewhat agree=3, neither=2, strongly and somewhat disagree=1). Comfortingly, the results were very similar to the ordered logit model results.

⁸ To calculate the predicted probabilities, we set the following variables at their mean values: age=3 (35–44

age group), ideology=3 (moderate), partisanship=2 (independent), education=3 (some college), and news interest=2 (somewhat closely). For the four race dummies, we set each measure to 0 (which means that our probabilities are based on a white respondent).

⁹ The other variables in the model are set at the values described above. However, we set male to 0 (female) since

it is a control variable in this specification rather than the variable of interest. Age is not set to a particular value since it is the focus here.

¹⁰ Control variables set at the values mentioned above.

¹¹ Again, control variables set at the values mentioned above.

¹² We also investigated whether partisan and ideological strength were related to the sense of duty. The results are included in the Online Appendix. Generally speaking, those with strong ideological and partisan commitments are more likely than their counterparts to see voting and contributing as duties, which makes theoretical sense. We thank an anonymous reviewer for this idea.

¹³ See also: https://www.demos.org/research/whose-voice-whose-choice-distorting-influence-political-donor-class-

our-big-money and https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/05/17/5-facts-about-u-s-political-donations/

¹⁴ Studies have shown that there is a positive link between campaign spending and accurate levels of knowledge about candidate positions and ideology (see, e.g., Coleman & Manna, 2000). Thus, campaign donations (and the spending that follows) can have benefits for society (and not just those individuals who choose to give money).