Campaign Contributions in Local Elections

Abstract

This study helps fill a gap in both the urban politics and campaign finance literatures by examining donation patterns for municipal elections in Atlanta and St. Louis. These local campaigns raised substantial amounts of money, much of it from suburban and out-of-state contributors. Businesses were the main contributors, but development interests were not the dominant force portrayed in the urban political economy literature. Like state and federal elections, contributors seemed to pursue an "investment" strategy by targeting incumbents and citywide offices. Multivariate analyses revealed no simple relationship, however, between candidate characteristics and the amount of campaign contributions or between the amount of money a candidate raised and outcomes in city council elections.Research on campaign finance has burgeoned since public records began to be kept in the 1970s. Unfortunately, scholars of campaign finance generally have ignored local governments, while students of urban politics have produced limited research on elections in general and campaign finance in particular. This has occurred even though an estimated $350 million was spent on campaigns for county, municipal, and regional offices in 1992 (Alexander and Corrado 1995: 5-6), and campaign money is often viewed as a &dquo;tracer element in politics&dquo; that can provide &dquo;much valuable information about the patterns of political events and the distribution of political power&dquo; (Alexander and Corrado 1995: 1). This exploratory study bridges that gap in the literature by examining campaign contributions in two large cities-St. Louis and NOTE: The authors would like to thank the late and indispensable Jim Reid, as well as

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