Who Donates in Campaigns? The Importance of Message, Messenger, Medium, and Structure

While much is known about who votes in American elections, much less is known about who donates. In this book, the authors utilize a unique and historically unprecedented data set of donors from the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections to answer longstanding questions: what is the relationship between donors and candidates? How do candidates attract and respond to contributors? How do campaign strategies reflect changing campaign finance laws and the development of the internet? With unprecedented cooperation from the Obama, McCain, and Romney campaigns, the authors investigate presidential campaign donors at all giving levels to produce the most systematic and complete analysis of donors to presidential nominees to date. As elections are decided increasingly by donors' dollars, Who Donates to Campaigns? provides relevant research on the broader trends in partisan polarization and, more generally, on how campaigns can engage more citizens in political participation.

1. The importance of donors in American politics; 2. Profile of donors in 2008 and 2012; 3. What motivates donors to contribute?; 4. How the Internet, BCRA, and super PACs have affected campaigns, donor attitudes, and behavior; 5. New, repeat, continuing, and lapsed donors; 6. What distinguishes small donors?; 7. The diminished gender gap among democratic donors; 8. The timing of donations in presidential campaigns; 9. Policy implications of changing laws, regulations, and of who donates; 10. What explains donor behavior?

David B. Magleby is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Brigham Young University, Utah, and Senior Research Fellow at the Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy. He is the editor of a series on the financing of the quadrennial presidential election in the US since 2000.
Jay Goodliffe is Associate Professor of Political Science at Brigham Young University, Utah and Research Fellow at the Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy. His work has appeared in American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, Legislative Studies Quarterly, Political Behavior, and other journals.
Joseph A. Olsen is Associate Research Professor, Assistant Dean, and Director of Information Technology and Research Support in the College of Family, Home, and Social Sciences at Brigham Young University, Utah. He is a member of the American Statistical Association and the Psychometric Society.