Seminar with Ray La Raja

You are invited to the next joint AxPo/CEVIPOF seminar on Tuesday 21 November from 11:00-12:30 with Ray La Raja, Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, entitled Which candidates for the U.S. Congress benefit from small political donors?

Discussion by Noam Titelman, Postdoctoral researcher, AxPo/CEVIPOF, Sciences Po

When: Tuesday 21 November 2023, 11:00-12:30 (Paris time)
Location: Room K.008, Sciences Po (1 Place Saint Thomas d'Aquin 75007 Paris)*.

*There will also be a Zoom option to enable a hybrid seminar.

Abstract: Concerns about the outsized influence of wealthy donors in the United States gives hope that the surge in small donors to political campaigns might improve the political system. In this paper we assess which candidates for the US Congress are likely to benefit from the population of small donors. We explain both the structural features of the political system and candidate characteristics associated with increases in small donations. Our analysis highlights the expressive nature of making political contributions. Candidates benefit from small donors to the extent they can attract media attention and evoke strong emotions linked to identitarian loyalties, including partisanship, ideology, and gender. This dynamic applies to all donors, but is especially true for small donors because they are less embedded in elite partisan networks, which push contributions toward candidates favored by the party leadership. One consequence is that ideologically extreme candidates tend to benefit disproportionately from small donations. In the Democratic Party, women candidates tend to benefit due to a very high proportion of women small donors.

Ray La Raja's areas of expertise include political parties, interest groups, campaign finance, elections, political participation, American state and local politics, public policy and political reform. He is co-author with Brian Schaffner and Jesse Rhodes of Hometown Inequality: Race, Class, and Representation in American Local Politics (Cambridge University Press 2020). He previously co-authored with Brian Schaffner, Campaign Finance and Political Polarization: When Purists Prevail (Univ. of Michigan Press 2015), which was the winner of the Virginia Gray Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association's State Politics and Policy section. He is co-founder and former co-editor of The Forum: A Journal of Applied Research in Contemporary Politics and a member of the Academic Advisory Board of the Campaign Finance Institute. He was past president of the Political Organizations and Parties section of the American Political Science Association. He is co-founder and co-director of the UMass Poll, which conducts public opinion research in Massachusetts and the United States to inform policymaking.