The Fickle Financiers of elections? The impact of moving on individual contributions

ABSTRACT

What is the effect of a change in geographic location on the behavior of campaign donors? Looking at people who move presents a unique opportunity to assess the ways in which political behavior is altered by external circumstances. Holding the individual constant and observing how donation patterns vary under different external conditions allows us to explore donor behaviors in ways that are more difficult when using cross-sectional data. We use the DIME dataset to compare the donation behavior of over 7,000 individuals in the U.S. House election before and after they have moved. We observe the ways in which changes in the partisanship of the districts that they live in alter the share of their donations that go to each party. We find that the partisan composition of the districts that people arrive in influence their donation behavior – a move to a more Democratic district tends to increase the share of one’s donations that go to Democrats. We conclude by discussing what these findings can tell us about the partisan and strategic motivations of campaign donors.

Acknowledgement

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and journal editors for their constructive comments and suggestions. We also want thank participants in the School of Public Service Research Workshop at Boise State University, Shannon L. Jenkins, Jay Goodliffe, and Jennifer A. Heerwig for their helpful feedback on earlier versions of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Our main results also hold when taking an even more conservative approach and restricting the sample to donors with a last name frequency less than or equal to 1 per 100,000 using the Frequently Occurring Surnames data from the U.S. Census.

2 Some measures were missing for donors residing in the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico districts, so we dropped those observations from the sample.

3 See Online Appendix C for a table of descriptive statistics for all variables used in our models.

4 The Change in Democratic District Partisanship variable is created by subtracting the Democratic share of the two party vote in the district that is moved to (the destination district), from the Democratic share of the two party vote in the district that was moved away from. Negative values represent a move to a more Republican district, while positive values represent a move to a more Democratic district.

5 Our main finding regarding movers holds when we take a much more conservative name-matching approach and restrict our sample to those with a last name frequency of 1, giving us more confidence that the results reported in Table 1 are not a function of name-mismatches.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jaclyn J. Kettler

Jaclyn J. Kettler is an assistant professor of political science at Boise State University in Boise, Idaho. She studies American politics with an emphasis on state politics, political parties & interest groups, campaign finance, and women in politics.

Jeffrey Lyons

Jeffrey Lyons is an assistant professor of political science at Boise State University in Boise, Idaho. His research focuses on American politics, specifically public opinion, political behavior, political psychology, and state politics.