| dc.description.abstract | The polarization of political elites, proliferation of campaign contributions, and importance of primary elections are three features which define the modern era of politics in the United States. This dissertation investigates the strategies of candidates and their financial contributors in congressional campaigns using new data sources and methodological approaches. The first paper investigates how the relationship between candidates’ positions and their fundraising from individual and corporate PAC donors. Using a causal inference approach, I show that nominating an extreme U.S. House candidate does not substantially increase contributions from individuals nor decrease contributions from corporate PACs compared to nominating a moderate, suggesting that contributors’ decisions are shaped by factors beyond candidates’ positions. The second and third papers introduce an original dataset of hand-collected issue platforms from the campaign websites of all available U.S. House primary candidates in 2016, 2018, 2020, and 2022. In the second paper, I combine this text data with a machine learning approach to develop unidimensional estimates of primary candidates’ stated campaign positions. Using this measure, I demonstrate that candidate rhetoric --- but not contribution networks --- varies systematically by district partisanship, suggesting that donor behavior has nationalized while candidate behavior remains district-tailored. In the third paper, I use the campaign platforms to evaluate how single-issue interest groups respond to primary candidates’ prioritization of their issue and balance a desire to obtain access to incumbents with helping to elect new issue champions. My results suggest that issue groups rely on campaign rhetoric to identify potential issue champions during the primary election stage, and continue to cultivate relationships with them once in Congress. Taken together, the findings reported in this dissertation have critical implications for how money shapes the nature of our politics: campaign contributors are more strategic than existing studies suggest, and their instrumental behavior creates less straightforward incentives for candidate extremism than currently thought. | |
