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Objective. This study examines the backgrounds, political attitudes, issue preferences, and political participation of congressional donors who contribute $200 or more to congressional campaigns. Methods. We use a nationwide survey of more than 1,000 donors and analyze differences among these individuals using cluster analysis. Results. Although these significant donors are economic elites, we find they are not monolithic in their political views and attitudes. There are significant cleavages in the donor pool across and within the two major parties on various political issues and involvement in different political organizations. Perhaps most important, we find that the most active donors hold the most ideologically extreme political views. Conclusions. The results suggest that the sharp cross-party differences and the meaningful variations within party coalitions, combined with the greater activity of more ideologically extreme donors, contribute to and reflect party polarization.Diverse coalitions are a defining aspect of American political parties.
This article examines the surprising outcome of the 2016 presidential election, which saw Donald Trump defy nearly all of the conventional wisdom to become the 45th president of the United States. Political commentators and experts offered several immediate postelection explanations for Trump's victory, one of which focused on how Trump was able to generate considerable unpaid or free media for himself, often directly through Twitter. This article explains the theory and rationale underlying the free media thesis (FMT) and then examines whether there is any preliminary empirical support for it. Using media tracking data and public opinion surveys, the results reveal that Trump indeed dominated the unpaid media market. Although the findings in this article cannot make causal claims about whether Trump's advantages in free media are the primary reason for his upset victory, the results, nonetheless, suggest that some of the basic conditions necessary for the FMT were present in the 2016 election and that the FMT offers a plausible avenue for further analysis and future research.
In this study, the authors test for the presence of bias during Fox News and CNN’s coverage of the 2004 national party conventions. The content analysis demonstrates that Fox News’s coverage was more favorable to the Republican Party than it was to the Democratic Party, while CNN’s coverage was more impartial. The authors also use panel data from the National Annenberg Election Survey to show how opinion change toward the 2004 presidential candidates was associated with exposure to cable television coverage of the national party conventions. These findings highlight the evolving role of the cable news media in presidential campaigns and elections.
Campaign finance reform has become a hotly debated issue at both the federal and state levels. Maine and Arizona became the first states to implement a fully subsidized public finance system for legislative candidates during the 2000 election. Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Hawaii have provided partial public funding to legislative candidates for several elections. The experiences of these states provide an opportunity to evaluate public funding programs. This study addresses the question: Does public funding reduce the time that candidates devote to fundraising? Using data comprising a representative nationwide sample, we demonstrate that candidates who accepted full public funding spent less time raising money than other candidates, including those who accepted partial public funding. We conclude that full public funding has the potential to redirect modern campaign efforts away from the "money chase," freeing time for other campaign activities.
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