Campaign donors in the United States, though a small and unrepresentative segment of the broader electorate, have the financial means to potentially exert an outsized influence in American politics. Understanding the micro-foundation of donor behavior–why do they give? And how do they choose among different candidates and other recipients?–can allow us to assess the aggregate implications of the existing campaign finance system on the nature of democratic representation in the United States. My dissertation adopts this analytic approach to study the implications of donor behavior on three areas of American political institutions: interest group politics, political extremism, and electoral accountability.The first essay, “How Internal Constraints Shape Interest Group Activities: Evidence from Access-Seeking PACs” (recently published at the American Political Science Review),1 re-examines the enduring puzzle of why there is little interest group money in politics relative to the economic value of policies at stake. A key fact motivating this puzzle is that interest group political action committees (PACs) give much less to campaigns than legally allowed. Prevailing theories infer that PAC contributions must yield minimal returns, but this argument presumes that interest groups can always give more than observed if they found doing so worthwhile. This chapter provides an alternative perspective by arguing that internal constraints faced by interest groups may also explain why they give little.I focus on one particular source of internal constraints that affect access-seeking PACs (e.g., corporate PACs): these PACs are required by law to fund themselves solely with voluntary and limited donations from affiliated individuals (e.g., employees). A collective action problem in PAC fundraising therefore makes non-material factors, especially partisanship, more pivotal than material incentives in these individuals’ decisionmaking. As a result, access-oriented PACs, which contribute across party lines and favor members of the majority, may risk alienating donors with partisan preferences when contributing to politicians from the opposite party. I provide robust evidence for this hypothesis in two studies. First, difference-in-differences analysis of longitudinal campaign finance records demonstrates that individual donors are less likely to give to their affiliated access-seeking PACs when PAC contributions support the party that donors oppose. Second, my original survey of corporate PAC donors shows that donors know how their PACs allocate contributions across parties, and replicates the main result from the difference-in-differences analysis in a survey experiment.In short, through the PAC fundraising process, donors’ partisan preferences constrain accessseeking PACs’ ability to reap the full benefits of strategic campaign contributions, including such contributions’ integral role in facilitating lobbying efforts. I therefore shed a new light on why there is little interest group money in elections, and highlight the importance of understanding interest group strategy and power by focusing on the constraints imposed by individual members on whom interest groups critically depend.My second chapter examines the open question of whether campaign donors, like voters in the United States and elsewhere, become more favorable towards extremist politicians in the aftermath of financial crises.
