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12 September 2007

Campaign contributions and the network of hedgers

I’ve blogged in the past about the fund raising networks underlying the campaign. Well, one of my students last term, Katie Selenski, did a nice paper examining the pattern of campaign contributions to Giuliani, Obama, and Clinton. She examined contribution patterns as two mode (contributor x candidate) data. In particular, who maxed out in contributing to at least two of those three candidates? 344 individuals fell into that category in the first quarter of this year (clearly people with more money to spare than I do). To give a flavor, below is a list of California Obama-Clinton hedgers (88 in all).

While there are some big name entertainers on the list (see Streisand, Spielberg, Manilow, etc), there is a remarkable number of top executives (big circles)—although we don’t know how this compares to nonhedgers. One suspects that for top executives there is a particular instrumental value to these contributions, which is why we would see so many.

Below is the picture of hedgers nationally.

Again, there are a large number of top executives. And, unsurprisingly, there are more Clinton-Obama hedgers than Giuliani-Obama or Giuliani-Clinton. But there are still a remarkable number of folks in the latter two categories. Some interesting patterns: there are more attorneys who do a Clinton-Giulianai hedge than Obama-Giuliani, and more people from finance who go the Obama-Giuliani path. Presumably this reflects the underlying social structure of campaign contributions—e.g., one imagines that many individuals are recruited to contribute by associates, and may have associates who belong to different candidate camps.

In any case, these are nice illustrations of the potential power of these data. I have seen a fair amount of news reporting based on these data—would be interested in postings on academic or professional (i.e., campaign fundraising) uses of these data.

Posted by David Lazer at September 12, 2007 10:47 AM

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