• DOI:10.17266/35.1.3
• Corpus ID: 37598851

Donor Motivations in the California State Legislature: A Social Network Analysis of Campaign Contributions

@article{Apkarian2015DonorMI,
  title={Donor Motivations in the California State Legislature: A Social Network Analysis of Campaign Contributions},
  author={Jacob Apkarian and Robert A. Hanneman and Shaun Bowler and Byron Martin},
  journal={Connection Science},
  year={2015},
  volume={35}
}

• J. Apkarian, R. Hanneman, +1 author B. Martin
• Published 2015
• Political Science
• Connection Science

This paper investigates campaign donor motivations by examining the ways in which donations to political campaigns tie candidates for the legislature together. Using social network analysis, we examine campaign donations to the California state legislature in 2004. We demonstrate that donor motivations vary by donor type where individual donors and candidate committees are more ideologically motivated while business donors tend to be investment-driven when contributing. We also examine the extent to which different donor types reflect local interests along with how agendas regarding candidate demographic characteristics influence patterns of donation (i.e. who donors prefer to connect). We find that donors generally tend to promote polarization by connecting candidates of the same political party, but that experienced candidates are very well connected and tend to bridge the party divide.