Policies, profits, networks, or duty? Donors’ motivations for contributing to parties and interest groups

ABSTRACT

Understanding variation in donors’ motivations for contributing to parties, interest groups, and candidates is increasingly important for fundraising success in an era in which joint fundraising committees and online bundling platforms provide expanded opportunities for collaborative fundraising efforts. However, the motivations of party and interest group contributors remain understudied. Using questions from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study of 2016 in a series of logistic models, I investigate donors’ self-reported motives for contributing to parties, interest groups, and congressional candidates. I find party and interest group donors share a distinct desire to socially network with other donors whereas donors to House and Senate candidates respectively seek to influence public policy and to help their businesses. Civic duty is the only joint motivation underlying candidate and party contributing; otherwise, motivations for contributing to congressional candidates versus parties and interest groups are found to be distinct from one another.

KEYWORDS:

• Donors
• Campaign finance
• Parties
• Interest groups
• Congressional candidates

Highlights

• Party and interest group donors have different motivations from congressional donors.

• Party and interest group donors share a distinct desire to socially network.

• House donors are uniquely motivated by a desire to influence public policy.

• Senate donors are uniquely motivated by a desire to help their businesses.

• Both party and congressional donors are similarly motivated by civic duty.

Notes

¹ Verba et al. (1995) do not provide a break-down of the response items’ percentage frequencies. Thus, I cannot report the frequency of those citing “chance to further my job or career” as a motivation (p.111). Other reasons for contributing under the category of material benefits included: getting help from an official on a personal or family problem; running for office someday; getting a job with the government someday; and direct services provided to organization members (p.111).

² Using the option “subpop” in Stata, the models are restricted to the specified donor population but the standard errors are calculated based upon the entire survey sample.

³ See similarly constructed scale in Rhodes et al. (2016).

⁴ A major limitation of this study is that the motivations for contributing to each entity must be understood to a degree in isolation from one another. While it is possible to compare sign and significance within each model and across the models, the specific magnitude of the effects of each motivation cannot be compared across logistic models. Additionally, a combined multinomial model is not feasible because donors are not being forced to choose between contributing to a candidate versus a particular group or between a party and an interest group. A future experimental study could ask respondents to choose between options or a survey could ask respondents to rank order their options. However, I do not have access to such data in this study. Additionally, the CCES asks how much the donor has contributed to all candidates and groups in total over the course of the election cycle. Thus, it is not possible to know where donors committed the most money. Thus, the data also do not indicate whether the donor made one large contribution or multiple small dollar contributions.