How has the rise of big donors affected our policies? Conventional wisdom suggests that it’s pushing our politics to the right. However, in a recent post over at Vox, political scientist Seth Masket, whose work I deeply respect and have read for years,argues that “what’s not happening here is the superdonors skewing American politics rightward.”
His argument is that so far in the 2016 election, superdonors have tended to be Republican simply because that’s where the interesting contest is — and not as an indication of any larger trend. Here, I have no qualms. However, he links to one of his older posts when he notes that “studies of the ideological leanings of superdonors suggest they come from all across the ideological spectrum.” In that older post, he argues that “the 30 wealthiest donors in the country are actually pretty moderate… Apart from some extremists like George Soros and the Koch brothers, most exist between the party medians.” He concludes that, “The super wealthy are certainly paying a lot of money into the political system these days, but it’s far from clear what they’re getting out of it.”
There’s quite a bit to get into in these statements, but the core fault is to assume that 1) because big donors appear to vary across the ideological spectrum, their net effect on policy is a wash, and 2) because big donors appear moderate and policy has become increasingly extreme, big donors aren’t influencing policy.
I believe that both these arguments are flawed, and that big donors are shifting policy rightward. (I’ve addressed evidence for donor influence over policy before.) Masket cites the work of Adam Bonica, Nolan McCarty, Keith T. Poole and Howard Rosenthal, who examine the ideology of the candidates these donors gave to, and by doing so, work backwards to the ideology of donors.
The chart below suggests that the candidates that the 30 richest American contributors give to are more ideologically toward the center of the CF-Scale (a metric developed by Bonica for examining ideology) than small donors, while the donors from the Forbes 400 list and the directors and executives of the Fortune 500 companies skew right. The chart also includes the donations of the top .01 percent of donors. (“In 2012, 62 percent of contribution dollars raised from the top 0.01 percent went to Republicans.”) The donations include anything given between 2004 and 2012.
However, there are limitations to drawing too much inference from these data to the effect of donors on policy. Since the rich tend to be socially liberal, but economically moderate or even conservative, then this will shift policy in important ways. Indeed, of the five most left of the 30 richest (Larry Page, Sergey Brin, George Soros, Anne Cox Chambers and James Simons), only one, George Soros, is known for being deeply concerned with economic inequality. On the other hand, the far right — occupied by Charles Koch and David Koch, as well as the Walton family — tend to pursue an agenda that is very much to the economic right. Further, it’s difficult to know what the scores would look like in historical context. According to DW-Nominate, a similar measure to the CF-Scale, “The most conservative Republicans in the House 25 or 30 years ago would be among the most liberal members now.” So it might be that today’s billionaire donors seem to moderate because the scale has already been shifted to the right. Paul Pierson and Jacob Hacker showed in “Winner-Take-All Politics” how increasing reliance on big donors and fundraising has shifted Democrats away from traditional bastions of Democratic support like labor. The Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), which “placed heavy stress on deficit reduction as a key element of economic policy,” was indicative of this trend.
There are other reasons to suspect that donors are shifting policy to the right, at least on economic policy. In a 2010 study, three scholars, Brittany H. Bramlett, James G. Gimpel and Frances E. Lee, examined high-donor neighborhoods. In a previous study, Gimpel and two other political scientists had shown that “the Republican and Democratic donor bases are much more geographically similar than their bases of electoral support.” In their investigation of high-donor neighborhoods with high concentrations of donors have preferences that differ from the rest of the nation.
They write:
“Even after accounting for their higher income and education, Democratic residents of high-donor areas are far more supportive of free trade and less concerned with job losses resulting from foreign competition than is typical for members of their party.”
They note that high-donor neighborhoods also tend to be more cosmopolitan (supportive of gay rights and abortion rights, for instance).
This piece originally appeared on Salon.