Small Campaign Donors

Laurent Bouton, Julia Cagé, Edgard Dewitte and Vincent Pons

No 17310, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: We build a new dataset of all 340 million individual contributions reported to the U.S. Federal Election Commission 2005-2020 to study the characteristics and behavior of small campaign donors. The reporting requirements of fundraising platforms such as ActBlue enable us to observe contribution-level information on the vast majority of small donations, which have grown rapidly since 2005. Small donors differ from large donors in gender, ethnicity, and income, and they are more representative of the U.S. population. They act less strategically than large donors, respond more to candidates’ public prominence, and are more susceptible to TV and social media ads.

Keywords: Campaign finance; Campaign contributions; Small donations; Actblue; Winred (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 M37 P00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-05
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Related works:
Working Paper: Small Campaign Donors (2022)
Working Paper: Small Campaign Donors (2021)
Working Paper: Small Campaign Donors (2021)
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