Small Money Donating as Democratic Politics

Abstract

Since 2008, the number of people in the United States making small monetary donations to political causes, both within and beyond electoral politics, has skyrocketed. While critics of “big money” in politics laud these donations because they are small, proponents of small-scale democratic political action eye them suspiciously because they are monetary. Neither group interrogates whether the monetariness of these donations might be a source of their democratic potential. Building on Wendy Brown’s conceptual distinction between monetization and economization, I argue that small-money political donations are potentially democratic not only because they are small, but also because they are monetary. More specifically, the mobility, divisibility, commensurability, and fungibility of money help make small-money political donations potentially democratic, by making them potentially accessible, non-intrusive, and collective. Money is the coin of the economic realm, but it can also be a currency of democratic politics.

The Nationalization of Individual Campaign Contributions in U.S. Senate Elections, 1984-2020

“…In this article, we consider campaign finance as an indicator of political nationalization, and track changes in the nationalizing behavior of the American people and their senators over a 40-year time series. Although representative of many political attributes, we confine our consideration of campaign donations to represent interest in and a desire to influence American elections outside of one’s own state (Corrado et al, 2010; Rubenstein, 2022). Using data from over 130-million individual-level campaign donations, we elaborate on the nationalization thesis by analyzing the geographic distribution of campaign contributions to U.S. Senate races from 1984 to 2020.…”