When we talk about money in politics, we tend to focus on the disproportionate influence of corporations and the extremely wealthy—the “billionaire class,” in the words of Bernie Sanders, who made campaign finance reform a cornerstone of his 2016 presidential platform and pledged not to accept any contributions from PACs to fund his campaign. Since the Citizens United ruling in 2010, super PACs have pumped vast sums of money into elections in exchange for political influence. “While money doesn’t buy elections,” the investor Jonathan Soros once said, “it does buy politicians, whether they intend to be bought or not.”

While PACs have attracted much attention and controversy over the last few years, individual contributions still remain the primary source of campaign funding in federal elections. But unlike the Sanders campaign—which was nearly two-thirds funded by small donations under $200—the majority of the individual contributions that sustain political campaigns are made in amounts of over $200. Who are these contributors, and what kinds of legislators do they support?

In a recent report published in the American Journal of Sociology and supported by RSF, incoming visiting scholar Jen Heerwig (Stony Brook University) examines the behavior of elite individual donors, or those who have contributed over $200 to an election campaign. Prior studies have shown that nearly 80% of donors who contribute over $200 to campaigns earned incomes in the top 10% of the income distribution, and over a third earned incomes top 5%. In her study, Heerwig constructed a database of individual contributions over $200 made in federal elections from 1980 through 2008. By linking all donations that originated with one unique contributor within and across election cycles, Heerwig was able to track repeat donors in federal elections and analyze how these donors’ political alignments changed over time.

While some past studies on individual campaign contributions have suggested that repeat donors are ideologically motivated (and therefore more likely to support the same party over and over), Heerwig instead finds a persistent positive association between the frequency of giving and “split contributing”—or donations to both parties. Heerwig also shows that the donors who consistently contribute to both Democrats and Republicans also tend to support moderate incumbents within each political party. Together, Heerwig notes, “the findings suggest that repeat individual donors are less partisan in their strategies, and vis-à-vis the incumbents to whom they send donations, these repeat contributors are also less ideologically extreme.” The majority of elites who donate money to political campaigns, in other words, may behave less like the Koch brothers or George Soros than popular discussions of the influence of money in politics have acknowledged.

Read the full article from the American Journal of Sociology.