Donor Opinions and What Drives Them to Give

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: So this leads to the question, what do donors actually think? Well, okay, so what are their views, what's the view of the national donorate? So this is a paper that I've produced with, I guess some of, I'm mentioning their schools because I know you all come from a variety of different universities.

So this is with Josh Clinton at Vanderbilt, Mike Barber, who's at, Mike Barber, sorry, at BYU, and then Greg Huber, who's at Yale. So what we did is we went out and we conducted our own survey of donors. To do that, you have to contact people by postal mail because you just have their postal address.

So you assume a very low response rate, so you send out very large number of mailers to donors who have been identified by the Federal Election Commission. And then we also ran parallel surveys using the same mode of survey on the general population for a general population comparison, as well as a set of affluent individuals who had been identified by TargetSmart.

Which is a consumer products kind of marketing company, as affluent and having at least 150,000 in income or over a million in net worth, with the idea that donors, on average, tend to be wealthier. So we don't wanna just be capturing kind of well, is this all affluence or is it really something about donating that's relevant?

So we asked about a range of issues on the survey, the survey, as I mentioned, it was by postal mail, but then we directed people to get on their computer to answer it that way. Gave them a small incentive of a charitable donation that's since been banned by Princeton, which I was there, I'm not sure quite why, but we got it in under the wire.

We kind of tried to choose very general Red Cross, they got a choice, but they were all kind of in that realm, I don't know, maybe some tax violation. In any case, and we did make the donations, upon concluding. What we find overall in domestic issues is that donors tend to be much more polarized than the general population, and even then, affluent co-partisans.

So that's comparing, say, for Republicans, a republican donor versus a republican, someone who's self-identified as a Republican. You could say a voter, but they actually don't even have to vote, it can be a constituent, a republican constituent, and then again, also the case for relative to affluent co-partisans.

And then for Democrats, the donors tend to be more liberal, so this exists across a range of issues, such as the minimum wage, the tax rates, spending on anti poverty spending, environmentalism. We create, if you're looking at the slides what's called a factor score, which is kind of an average, effectively, across all of the issues.

There's a little bit of variation in some issues, but the overall effect is polarization of the donors relative to the public and affluent. On foreign policy, we find something slightly different, and I think it does relate to Trump's appeal in the 2016 election on some of these globalization issues, appeal to voters.

Which is we find that donors from both parties tend to be more pro-globalist, pro internationalist. So we find that donors tend to be more in favor of free trade, more in favor of, pro immigration, increasing immigration limits, and also less isolationist. And we find that affluence here tends to be reinforcing.

So whereas on domestic issues, the affluent tend to look much more like general population voters and look very different than donors here, particularly for Republicans. But even a little bit for Democrats, the affluent tend to look like the donors rather than the general population. And so there seems to be, more of a split that some would argue is represented than in the DC community views on these, on these issues.

Okay, one thing we did with this data, just to note, is we were interested in, what about small versus large donors. Because a lot of the policy reforms are very focused on, what we really need are just small donors. The problem is this big money that's coming in from a few individuals, and if we just focused on the small donors, everything would be great.

So this is, again, where you get to make up your own mind. But you should be aware, if you're concerned about polarization and you believe the results, that national donor opinion has an impact on the policymakers. The small donors are actually more polarized than the donors, and by small donors here, we're in this case saying non affluent donors, although we've done it other ways, cut that other ways as well.

So less affluent donors tend to be more polarized than the affluent donors, but even the affluent donors are quite polarized. So it's not that the affluent donors are not, and that it goes away, and on the international issues, again, it's sort of pretty similar results. Because affluence was reinforcing, then there's not a big difference between affluent and non affluent donors, not surprisingly.

Okay and finally, we don't have to get into all the statistics here, but we've kind of looked at a lot of different types of donors. Like, well, maybe again, we're just kind of, if we looked at a different type of donor, we'd find something different, or we at least find that these effects don't hold for certain types of donors.

What we find is that we can't find a type of donor that the effects don't hold for that. I've described this polarization between the parties on domestic issues and the pro internationalization on the international issues. We do find that some types of donors have even more polarizing beliefs and even more pro internationalist beliefs than others.

So those who gave out of state, those who also give in presidential and congressional races tend to be some more active donors. But even those who don't give in presidential races who are in state, whether you gave a lot or not, all of those effects hold. Okay, I promised a little bit about donor motivations, which was in your readings, and then a bit about the policy reforms.

So in the work that you read, where we looked at the individual donor motivations, what we found is that policy and ideology are kind of prime drivers of why individual donors give. So this sort of circles home some of the other findings I've discussed, which is that these are very policy motivated individuals.

Therefore, it shouldn't be that surprising that their policy beliefs differ from those of the rest. Of the population. And it shouldn't be that surprising that if members are trying to build their lists of national donors. They would be catering to views that donors tend to have.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: That's not to say that nothing else matters in congressional races.

There is evidence that the competitiveness of the race matters. Although, as I'll mention and I mentioned earlier, the PACs, it tends to go in the opposite way. Some individuals do seek access, as the article pointed out, there are individuals who are, say. Owners of small companies and they want access about something that's happening in their district.

Even then, these donations tend to be targeted to policy and ideological allies. So the individuals do not tend to have with rare exceptions, this pattern of bipartisan giving. And then with presidential candidates, this is not in your reading because that was a study of Congress. Personal attributes can matter as well.

Again, political action committee motivations, quite different. As mentioned, bipartisan giving because they're looking to give to winners. There's a huge incumbency bias, and they just tend to give to whoever the incumbent is. They're often seeking kind of regulatory oversight, which, again, is pretty much outside of the public eye.

That's where it's kind of less about these roll call votes and what's happening on the floor and more what's happening in agencies. The big exception are advocacy PACs who behave kind of more akin to individual donors. Something like a pro life or pro choice group, an environmental group on either side of the line.

Finally, we haven't said much about party and candidate leadership PACs. Their importance is increasing. These are the PACs that members raise to give to other members. I mentioned them here. We can't kinda cover everything in, 35 to 40 minutes, but they're obviously quite distinct from the other types of PACs.

Okay, this is a summary of what we've seen thus far. Before I go into the some initial thoughts on policy reforms, which is just campaign money can affect election outcomes. But not by as much as commonly assumed. And that's just not by, there's a temptation to sort of talk about like, the public doesn't know this.

The public doesn't know that. Clearly, really smart people Like Mike Bloomberg and Hillary Clinton didn't know this. So, I mean, the people who make the mistakes are often the ones who should know better. So it's not surprising that a lot of the public doesn't understand it if those who are in the game seem to not understand the evidence.

That, well, I should note there's often this world in politics, this goes beyond this talk. Where, and I wanna say this really respectfully because the AIDS are often so important to my research. So I don't want the AIDS if you're, I know we record these. But, the incentives of AIDS is always to tell the candidate they can achieve for the candidate what the candidate wants.

And so there's sort of misalignment of incentives sometimes I think in saying, like, hey. This isn't gonna be achievable because then they'll hire the person, the candidate will hire the person who says. No, it's fully achievable, even if the better advice is to sort of focus on what's achievable and what's not and to focus the money where it's.

But again, Hillary Clinton and Mike Bloomberg were hardly, newbies to the game, so they should have known for themselves. Okay, individual donors are the largest source of campaign funds. So remember that by far, I mean, not just by a little bit, by far. So remember that when you hear about concerns, not that you're certainly allowed to be concerned about groups and all that.

But don't forget that there is evidence that members cater policy positions to national donor opinion. And individual donors are highly policy motivated. And that's especially the case for small donors. So don't fall for this, if only. First of all, small donors are usually not people. They may be upwardly, I hope my daughter, who's in college, is upwardly mobile.

We'll just, but, I mean, they may be people who are sort of fulfilling that lifetime consumption. I may not have much money now, or I'm charging it to my parents credit card or whatever. But it's not, people who are donors are not even when they're, quote, small donors.

These are not people who are really thinking, who are really struggling financially. Right, so this is still, even if they're officially not affluent, this is still a very middle income group on the whole. And I think that's very important when we have this romanticization of small donors that seems to be out there.

Okay, so that leads into current policy debates. There's evidence in the literature that when you cause states have variation on how much they restrict donations. So this gets into this love affair with the small donors. And the more that you restrict individual contributions, the more polarized your legislature tends to be.

And the legislators you, which is fully consistent with everything I've said. Now, some people would say, I'm good with that. So I'm not gonna take a normative position here until you might say, I like, back in the 1950s. The, I was not alive then, by the way, but the political science association was saying, it's really terrible.

The parties aren't, they're too similar to each other. It's really terrible. So now, the American Political Science association. It's really terrible. The parties are really polarized. So, I mean people can have different views of how similar they want the parties to be and how polarized they want their options to be.

But small donors are gonna encourage polarization. There is no evidence I'm aware of that suggests the opposite. And there is paper after paper that suggests this effect. So it's unpopular. The committee I'm giving you, we haven't gone public with our recommendation. I mentioned the task force I'm on that is producing this report that's gonna go public quickly by academic standards.

In the next month or two, but is being finalized right now. One of our recommendations is to allow more contributions to parties than individual donors. As I mentioned, this bipartisan task force with a wide range of political scientists. And kind of mostly lawyers who operate in the campaign finance world, we know it's gonna be really unpopular to give to parties.

So because it kind of. The parties are a mess. Our belief is that one of the reasons the parties are amassed is that the donations can't go to the parties. And that they go in this other way. You can agree or disagree. We know we're gonna be pummeled.

But now you'll know some of the reasoning that a variety of us have had. Contribution limits on PACs are usually popular. And I should note they're actually often very popular with corporations and labor unions themselves. Because a lot of them feel that they have to give the maximum in order to have access to the member.

So, the last thing they want is a high limit where they feel like they just basically have to give it to all the members they want access to, so these tend to be very popular. So, our group doesn't make any recommendations on those grounds, I'm not gonna waste a lot of breath.

It is just worth knowing, though, that they tend to be more bipartisan and favor compromise in deal making. So, one of the complaints right now in Congress is that they're unwilling to cut a lot of deals, right? And make tradeoffs and sort of push, let's make a deal on immigration, right?

Let each side have different kind of give everyone some, and no one's gonna be 100% happy, but it'll be better, the argument would be, but we can improve the current regime. Those deals are often very hard to cut, and that's gonna be very hard to cut if you have donors who are not interested in deal making and the like and favor more extremity.

The third one is something that's not talked about a lot, but does emanate from some of the things and relates to some of the evidence I've presented. It's weird, we tend to think that donations, this is great, we want everybody donating. It's worth noting when you donate even a small amount now, usually it's very public.

Because win red and ActBlue Campaigns, even when you give under the threshold that's required to be public, which is above $200. If you're giving through an online platform, it's often easier for the campaigns just to send it all over to the FCE. So, this became clear to my collaborators and I on that survey, because we actually didn't think we'd be getting many donors below or that as many as we did below $200 because they don't have to be reported.

But since everybody's sending them in now, like 40% of our sample are these small donations, this is a very weird environment, we have a lot of laws that protect the secrecy of your vote, right? Meanwhile, we have a lot of people. Who are saying everybody should donate, everybody should donate.

Again, I say this a little cautiously, but I think we have to at least think about the ramifications of this kind of publicity of donating and whether there should be protections. A few states, a very few, including California, do protect people from discrimination on the basis of political donating, but that's really an exception.

It's less than a handful of states do that, even though most states, not all, but most, protect people from discrimination if their vote were discovered. And even the vouchers, if anyone's from Seattle, you may be aware there's a public voucher scheme that's just starting to get researched, where everyone gets a voucher to donate.

So, this takes care of this kind of you have to be at least middle class probably if you're donating, but it's public potentially, who you donated to. So this is, again, a very kind of weird system that I think has not gotten enough attention. And it would create a system where people who are more heterodox and don't want the backlash from their community wouldn't donate.

And you'd see these sorts of results where the people who are pretty polarized are donating. Okay, party litigation funds, this is kind of also less well known, very well known to people who work in campaign finance. But not well publicized, which is that in 2014, for whatever reason, the parties thought it was a good idea to try to end run the donations to parties' caps.

By allowing these large donations only for litigation and admittedly for party headquarters in the convention center as well. But what you can see, and I apologize, the full years didn't come out, but they matched with the law on passage. Is that legal expenses, of course, if what you're allowed to donate for and give money for, and the parties now have all this money for litigation on elections, there's gonna be a rise in spending on that issue.

So, one of the things our task force proposes is that those funds be allowed to be spent by anything by the parties. So, the parties can choose, we're not trying to say no one, but that they could use the funds, say, to get people elected rather than litigating the election.

So, those funds are actually more generous at this point, we would argue, than the kind of election type funds for parties, and that's not a good situation. Finally, Citizens United, because I figured someone would ask me about it if I didn't bring it up. And it does relate, it's not the focus of the talk, obviously, but it does relate a little bit.

So, I mentioned already that there's this evidence from variation in state legal regimes that there's not a partisan effect of this legal regime. And again, I do say the word partisan with some emphasis, because that is different than saying there could be, say, a pro-business effect or a pro-labor effect, depending on who's making the contributions.

But it is also consistent, I know, with the broader evidence on corporate pacts and bipartisan giving behavior. And so, when Citizens United was passed, there was this, corporations are now gonna kind of overwhelm the process with all this independent spending. Corporations who are seen as heavily partisan are not gonna have access to the other party, and they're also gonna be seen by their consumers as highly partisan.

And so, corporations have not wanted to, on the whole, get into that highly partisan, this is on the whole behavior. And so, that's been one of the biggest debates in our task force because there are people who feel very strongly that that should be a really strong proposal of the task force.

And then other people in the task force say, but where is your-, what's everything else in this task force is kind of related to evidence in the social science literature. What are you basing this on when actually we have these studies? Again, that's not to tell you what to think about Citizens United, I'm very aware people have strong views on this subject, but you should read the evidence on it.

And, in the end of the day, sometimes people have views that are for normative reasons, that aren't about the evidence, but then at least know that that's what you're doing, be self-aware. Okay, I've kind of gone over slightly as faculty want to do, but not by too much, we still have about 15 minutes for questions.