Mapping Influence: Partisan Networks across the United States, 2000 to 2016

Abstract

The parties as networks approach has become a critical component of understanding American political parties. Research on it has so far mainly focused on variation in the placement of candidates within a network at the national level. This is in part due to a lack of data on state-level party networks. In this article, I fill that gap by developing state party networks for 47 states from 2000 to 2016 using candidate donation data. To do this, I introduce a backboning network analysis method not yet used in political science to infer relationships among donors at the state level. Finally, I validate these state networks and then show how parties have varied across states and over time. The networks developed here will be made publicly available for future research. Being able to quantify variation in party network structure will be important for understanding variation in party–policy linkages at the state level.

Do Party Rules Matter? An Examination of State Party Bylaws and Congressional Nominations

“…Combining the suggestions for future research made here with the existing research on broader political party networks will help to provide a more complete picture of the role of political parties in primary elections. (Reuning 2019). This means state party organizations can partner with their allies in these broader networks to work towards their goals.…”

The state of labor in the Democratic Party coalition

“…Our dependent variable is centrality within a party’s donation network. Reuning (2020) uses state legislative donation data to infer relationships among groups participating in state elections. In these networks, each node is an organization (non-individual) that participated in at least two election cycles between 2000 and 2016.…”

“…Two groups, nodes, are connected (have an edge between them) if their donation patterns are more similar to each other than what would be expected from chance given each group’s general propensity to donate. 4 The details of this edge identification method and its validation is in Reuning (2020). Each edge is interpreted as two groups working together to support similar candidates.…”

“…Labor unions anchor the Democratic Party (Schlozman, 2015), act as an alternative to organized business (Hertel-Fernandez, 2019; Schlozman et al, 2012), donate to state level campaigns (Flavin and Radcliff, 2011; Reuning, 2020), limit economic inequality (Bucci, 2018) and increase civic engagement (Francia and Orr, 2014). Historically, unions are a key ally of the Democratic Party, (Dark, 1999; Greenstone, 1970; Schattschneider, 1956).…”

“…To address labor’s centrality in political parties, we use state level donation networks from 2000–2016 (Reuning, 2020). We calculate how central unions (and associated PACs) are among partisan donors within each state network.…”