Who Donates in Campaigns?

This website presents the information and research behind the book “Who Donates in Campaigns?: The Importance of Message, Messenger, Medium, and Structure” by David B. Magleby, Jay Goodliffe, and Joseph Olsen. The purpose of this book is to examine the motivations behind donor contributions, as well as the relationship between donors and candidates. Without the ample support of foundations and our university, much of the research done in this book would not have been possible. In October 2018, we published our book, "Who Donates in Campaigns?: The Importance of Message, Messenger, Medium, and Structure." To learn more about the content within the book, click on "The Book." For further information on the data and research that was used to conduct our analyses, view the "Documentation" tab.

Our book is groundbreaking due to the unique source of our data. As a result of his extensive research on federal elections, David Magleby has obtained unusual access to campaign professionals in both parties. This access helped us secure random samples of small donors—individuals whose identities are not otherwise disclosed—from the Democratic and Republican party nominees in 2008 and 2012. This data provides a thorough and accurate view of the attributes of small donors who were an essential element of these two elections. In our design, we combine these random samples of small donors with a stratified random sample of donors from the FEC database. This information was classified based on donors’ aggregate levels of contribution. We worked with computer scientists to merge data provided by the FEC (which data is reported by donation, rather than by donor) and discrete donor records using individual donors as our unit of analysis. Other studies have been limited to using donations as their unit of analysis.

On this website, we include the data we gathered from surveying these random samples of donors. We provide the survey questions, codebooks, appendices, and figures that correspond with the data, yet were omitted from the text due to lack of space. We include three sets of data: 2008 cross-sectional data, 2012 cross-sectional data, and panel data surveying the same set of randomly selected donors in 2008 and 2012 to observe donor behavior over time.

Along with our research, on this website we present related publications on campaign donations.