The Nationalization of Individual Campaign Contributions in U.S. Senate Elections,1984-2020

Abstract

This article explores the trend of increasing nationalization in American politics and its effect on the U.S. Senate's federalizing dynamics, using campaign finance as an indicator. We analyze the geographic distribution of campaign contributions to U.S. Senate races from 1984 to 2020, tracing the nationalization of donor behavior in America. Key findings suggest that more ideologically conservative senators and those running for their first election are likely to rely heavily on out-of-state donations, with regional differences also evident. We argue that the nationalization of campaign finance challenges the Senate's representative structure and hints at another dimension of inequality in American politics—geographical versus national influence. This study offers no definitive normative argument but posits restricting out-of-state donations as a potential solution to address the growing inequality in the voting power of Senate members.

Keywords

campaign finance nationalization U.S. Senate

Introduction

Although the U.S. Senate has long been a centralizing feature of American federalism, the institution and its representatives are not “wholly national” (Riker, 1955). Geography is integral to the Senate’s representation and federalism in particular (Rhefeld, 2005). States, and senators are not just representatives of some arbitrary lines on the map, or districts; rather, they reflect the initial decision that Americans are simultaneously members of one community, and many (Derthick, 2001).

However, given the Senate’s counter-majoritarian biases, the nationalization of American politics (Hopkins, 2018) challenges the normative justifications undergirding the institution. Federalism requires that “national forces must be structurally restrained from infringing on the federal bargain,” and the Senate is central to that institutional arrangement (Bednar et al., 2001). So, to the extent that the Senate’s power-imbalances are often justified in reference to constitutional principles of federalism, community interest, and geographic diversity, the trend of increasing nationalization potentially undermines these institutional goals by subjecting geographically distinct, political communities to forces beyond their borders.

In this article, we consider campaign finance as an indicator of political nationalization, and track changes in the nationalizing behavior of the American people and their senators over a 40-year time series. Although representative of many political attributes, we confine our consideration of campaign donations to represent interest in and a desire to influence American elections outside of one’s own state (Corrado et al., 2010; Rubenstein, 2022). Using data from over 130-million individual-level campaign donations, we elaborate on the nationalization thesis by analyzing the geographic distribution of campaign contributions to U.S. Senate races from 1984 to 2020. This represents, to the best of our knowledge, the longest time series of Senate contributions assembled and geographically coded, and which offers several advances in understanding the role of money in politics.

First, to date, much of the work on the geography of campaign finance has focused on out-of-district spending for U.S. House incumbents (Canes-Wrone & Miller, 2022; Grenzke, 1988). Our data situate the Senate squarely within the empirical trend now confronting representatives of both chambers who have become increasing reliant on out-of-constituency donations (Crespin and Edwards, 2016). Descriptively, we show the pace of nationalization has been uneven within the two-major parties since 1984, and that changes in the geographic patterns of campaign finance have been especially in flux since 2014. Second, we tie these trends to a much longer time-series than common out-of-state/out-of-district databases allow (see, e.g., Center for Responsive, 2020). In doing so, we consider long-historical trends in out-of-state fundraising and link them to temporal shifts in the representation afforded by the Senate. Finally, while recent work has shown that increasing reliance on out-of-district fundraising makes U.S. House members more responsive to national donor base (Canes-Wrone & Miller, 2022), we find similar patterns of behavior for Senate behavior, even though Senators are theoretically less susceptible to the influence of party organizations in government (Smith et al., 2013). We conclude that this finding is of special relevance to ongoing work on political nationalization, given the Senate’s institutional grounding in territorially grouped constituencies, and the challenge partisan polarization poses to constitutional federalism (Jacobs and Milkis, 2022).

We use these data to consider nationalization from the perspective of incumbent Senators. Cataloging senators’ receipts, we conclude that those who are most ideologically conservative and are running for their first election are most likely to rely on out-of-state donations to fund their campaigns. We also conclude that important regional differences exist, and that the pace and contours of nationalization have been uneven across the states.

Given the likely endogenous relationship between legislative behavior and the receipt of out-of-state funds, we make no causal claims about the direct influence campaign contributions have on Senators’ votes, or the consequences those votes might have on campaign finance behavior of individuals (Canes-Wrone & Miller, 2022). Rather, we conclude that these empirical patterns suggest two previously under-discussed aspects of representation and American federalism within the current campaign finance regulatory framework.

First, we argue that the nationalization of campaign finance profoundly challenges aspects of the Senate’s representative structure. Money does not necessarily translate to votes (La Raja & Schaffner, 2015; Mutch, 2016), although the increasing dependence on individual contributions has shown that material inequities are increasingly reproduced in legislative outcomes (Canes-Wrone and Gibson, 2019). Nevertheless, to the extent that mal-apportionment in the U.S Senate is primarily justified as necessary to represent state-level or geographically-distinct interests, and to the extent that representatives are likely to be more responsive to campaign donors, the nationalization of receipts undercuts those arguments concerning the Senate’s structure as a representative institution.

Second, we see nationalization taking place alongside the larger democratization of campaign finance: the inclusion of more people and the reduction in the average size of donations. To this extent, we highlight another aspect of inequality in American elections – not the usual wealthy donor versus the not-wealthy donor, but the individuals who seek to influence election outcomes outside of their state, and those who focus their political participation within their state of residence. In this way, geography underscores another aspect of modern American politics, and divides the public into those who think geographically and those who are more national in their behavior. While scholars have noted that out-of-district donors to U.S. House elections tend to be more ideological and knowledgeable about policy (Baker, 2022), we also note that they are distinct in seeking to influence representation outside of the specific state in which they live. To that end, we consider the nationalization of campaign finance within the larger debate over American federalism and the Senate’s institutional role as a mediator of constituents place-specific concerns and identities (Pears and Sydnor, 2022).

Data alone offer no definitive argument about the normative value of federal-representative schemes or the Senate. On the one hand, we see the nationalization of receipts as problematic, given the territorial structure of the U.S. Senate and the growing inequality in voting power between its members. On the other hand, we note that restricting out-of-state donations is a potential solution to the discrepancy, one that seems eminently more practical than constitutionally altering the relative balance of power between large and small states.

Nationalization, Federalism, and Senate Representation

We are by no means the first to consider the political geography of campaign contributions in American politics (Gimpel et al., 2006; Gimpel et al., 2008), but extant theorizing is largely ahistorical, overlooking the changing patterns of elite behavior in an era of growing partisan polarization and political nationalization that challenges the Madison system of divided governmental authority.

Polarization between the two parties is at century-long high and growing (Iyengar et al., 2018; Abromowitz and Webster, 2016). These partisan divisions manifest in a number of behaviors, from the homogenization of media consumption to the decline of split-ticketing voting - all-in-all limiting the influence of earlier group divides that once tracked with state, regional, or local borders (Hopkins, 2018). Today, by and large, Americans do not think of themselves primarily in terms of their state or regional identities (Kincaid and Cole, 2018). Consequently, both major political parties have nationalized, limiting the extent to which national messaging and platforms deviate across the states (Hertel-Fernandez, 2019; Hopkins et al., 2022). Polarization, too, has raised the stakes between the two parties, as both dominant coalitions now see themselves as viable contenders to retake majority status in each election (Lee, 2009). Indeed, it is the transformation of federalism – the decline in state party autonomy, the emergence of national partisan cleavages, the rise of national interest groups – that make polarization “self-reinforcing” at a national level (Pierson and Shickler, 2020).

The Senate sits in the middle of these developments, and its role as an institution of federalism has always been in flux. Although the mode of election for senators was fiercely debated at the Constitutional Convention, the implications of direct election or appointment by the state legislature never deviated from the principle that the Senate was necessary to guard state interests from national, majoritarian decision-making (Rakove, 1987). Even when the mode of electing senators changed in 1913, it was primarily a response to democratizing forces during the Progressive Era that maintained a role for the territorial-based scheme of representation predicated on treating states-as-states; the connection between senators and their state legislative instructions was always perhaps tenuous, but mal-apportionment was not challenged as a fundamental aspect of America’s “highly centralized federal system” (Riker, 1987; Volden, 2004).

Polarization certainly affects the operation of Senate functions and legislative activity; but this is not necessarily a modern phenomenon (Lee, 2016). Nationalization, however, is both novel, and strikes at the heart of the Senate’s institutional purposes and significance. Nationalization has already altered the working arrangements of other institutions critical to the organization of federalism, such as political parties and the presidency (Truman, 1985). Local connections, for example, has become less predictive in U.S. House races as national-level variables trump local context (Jacobson, 2019). Individual candidates, even those running for local races, are unable to distinguish themselves from the positions of the party’s presidential candidate or national brand (Zingher and Richman, 2018). And nationalization has drastically altered the responsiveness of state-level actors to problems that are local, or state-specific (Burke, 2021).

Previous work has established that senators’ behavior is highly susceptible to constitutional rule changes that alter their incentive structure, but almost all of this work has leveraged the simple, direct, and observable change that came with the adoption of the 17th Amendment (Gailmard and Jenkins, 2009). Nationalization is a more amorphous process, taking place both among political elites and layman citizens, spread out across different constituencies (Caughey et al., 2018).

We argue that campaign finance behaviors are indicative of nationalization patterns. As both a cause and a consequence of these nationalizing tendencies, donor and campaign behavior mediate the pathways of constituent influence that alter legislative agendas and policy creation (La Raja & Schaffner, 2015; Mutch, 2016). The changing structure of American partisanship – ideological polarization and increasing competitiveness between the parties – has altered the incentives for raising money (Ensley, 2009). So too could the nationalization of campaign finance challenge the extent to which the Senate is influenced by state-level or national forces.

Existing research already points to the significance of campaign finance as a potential source of nationalization and polarization outside the Senate. For instance, as contributions from outside the state increase, members’ grow more ideologically extreme, limiting their responsiveness to constituent concerns (Baker, 2016). Non-constituent donors are also much more likely to be politically sophisticated than the average American, and donate with strategic partisan interest (Baker, 2022; Barber et al., 2017). This is part of a growing trend in “political hobbyism” that contributes to ideological extremism (Hersh, 2020). “Strategic Investors” are a distinct class of political participant precisely because they donate to candidates outside their state (Rhodes et al., 2016). In short, we are confident that the type of donor and the incentives they face are subject to a constantly shifting regulatory framework and a political landscape that changes over time (Magleby et al., 2018).

Data and Measures

To measure changes in out-of-state receipts, we rely exclusively on the raw, bulk data provided by the Federal Elections Commission (FEC). These data capture every transaction between donors and each Senate campaign since the 1984 elections. The raw bulk data also allow us to measure receipts across the entire campaign cycle (six years for most observations), where commonly used datasets only calculate the percent of contributions from in/out of state for a two-year period. Additionally, the FEC disaggregates all donations to federal campaigns (House, Senate, and President) via the source of the donation: individuals, party committees, or other registered PACs. We confine our analysis to itemized donations from individuals. Individual donations allow us to reliably measure the geographic distribution of candidate receipts, since donations from PACs or even state-party committees may aggregate funds from across state boundaries. Still, we conclude that this is a significant source of funds, representing over two-thirds of money that the typical Senate incumbent raises in an election cycle (Reynolds and Hall, 2019), and which has increasingly comprised a greater percentage of candidate receipts since 1980 (Barber and McCarty, 2016).

We began data collection in 1978 – the first-year data are available -- which provides us enough information to calculate fundraising for the full cycle leading up to the 1984 Senate elections. The raw data also allow us to account for a reporting change, which seems to problematize existing time-series analyses of campaign fundraising. Prior to 2015, the IRS only reported individual contributions that summed up to $200 or more across a given reporting period. After 2015, a contribution is included as soon as the total cycle-to-date amount exceeds $200; this increases the number of donations reported. This presents a challenge in creating a time-series, as prior to 2015, all donations below the $200 threshold within a given reporting period would be dropped, even if they summed to more than $200 in a given election cycle. In other words, someone could have made four, $100 donations in four different reporting periods across a campaign and under the old reporting requirements, they would not be included in the data. Per the IRS, the reporting change reflected a growing number of multiple, small donations that summed up in excess of $200 for each election (FEC, 2016).

Given the reporting discrepancy, we restricted data after 2015 only to donations that exceeded $200 within each reporting period to make it analogous to the data available between 1978 and 2015. We did this by identifying unique donors from the FEC’s reporting of name and address, and creating a single observation for each reporting period – quarter or annual. As with data reported prior to 2015, we dropped observations that did not exceed $200 for the reporting period, including transactions that we were unable to associate with a unique donor.

We are not surprised that the excluded data do not substantially alter the distribution of our primary dependent variables – namely, the percent of all money donated or raised from each state or Senate campaign. In 2016, we excluded 175,179 transactions totaling $650,000 – less than 1/100th a percent of the $862 million raised in the 2016 Senate races. In 2018, we dropped 646,046 transactions or donations, totaling $13.5 million, or 1.3% of all money raised in 2018. And in 2020, we excluded 1.6 million transactions that we were unable to attribute to specific individuals, or which fell below the $200 reporting threshold for a given quarter. Although this represented $43 million, it was just 2.9% of money raised for races held in 2020.

As such we not only conclude that our efforts to reconcile the post-2015 data were successful in making the transactions comparable with data reported between 1978 and 2015, we also find that they happen to represent such a small percentage of the overall amount of money donated in the campaign cycle that including them would not have changed the patterns we model below; subsequent analysis confirms this assumption.

After we reconciled the datasets, we then combined the individual year-files into sets of 6 years, representing the maximum number of years in a full campaign cycle. We then geo-coded each individual transaction, using the postal code disclosed by the donor to the campaign and then provided to the FEC. We assume that the postal code used for filing FEC reports is the resident’s voting jurisdiction, although we note the theoretical possibility that some residents who reside temporally out-of-state may vote in a state, but give money to their senator while living elsewhere. We view it as a necessary, albeit reasonable assumption to conclude that changing patterns are not reflective of massive changes in the behavior of part-time residents choosing to use their non-voting address to file campaign donations.

Once we identified the location of each contribution, we matched it to a senator’s campaign committee. We identified each senator that won an election between 1984 and 2020 and only include victorious candidates in the analysis; further research may extend these trends to non-victorious candidates, who may depend more or less on in-state funding. We did this mostly to maximize consistency across years, as senators may have multiple committees over the course of the careers; committee names and identification codes are often in flux earlier in the time-series when the campaign finance regulatory framework was relatively new. We individually checked each senator’s set of possible committee codes on https://www.fec.gov/data. We developed an algorithm to match each individual donation to a senator’s committee with the senator’s ICPSR code, to capture all possible donations over the full time-series, and within each 6-year funding cycle.

All in all, we account for nearly 20-million donors to Senate elections held between 1984 and 2020. This includes senators who donated to their own campaigns, always well in-excess of FEC individual contribution limits to candidate committees. However, including their contributions is necessary to calculate the total amount of funds raised, and to estimate the relative influence of in-state versus out-of-state contributions. In either case, including senator’s own contributions biases our results against finding patterns in out-of-state donations over time, as senators must be residents of their own state, contributing to their own campaign – thereby inflating the in-state percentage of funds raised.

We describe the statistical tests of association we conducted below, after a descriptive overview of the patterns we document using these data.

Nationalization and Out-of-State Donations: A Senator-To-Senator Comparison

We now consider how variation in Senator-specific attributes may systematically drive the nationalization of campaign finance behaviors.

As Figure 1 illustrates, senators have become increasingly less reliant on in-state campaign donations, as a percentage of all money raised leading up to their election. Nevertheless, since 1984, substantial differences have existed between the two parties. Republican senators have historically been more likely to raise money from within their state, although in the 2020 Senate Elections, Republican senators were the least likely to raise money from within state in all of the time series. Democratic senators have more consistently relied on a mix of in-state and out-of-state funding, on average tilting in the balance in favor of more out-of-state funding. As with Republicans, Democrats have relied increasingly more on out-of-state funds since the 2008 elections.

Figure 1.

Partisan differences in/out state contributions, 1984–2020.

Variation in Senator Attributes

We construct a linear model to adjudicate between possible theoretical reasons why some senators are more reliant on campaign funds from outside the state. We construct the following model:

Y_{i, t} = β_{0} + β_{1} {S e n a t o r}_{i} + {β_{2} S e n a t o r {C o n t e x t}_{t} + β}_{3} {E l e c t o r a l C o n t e x t}_{t} + α_{i} + ε_{i, t}

Y is a proportional measure of individual receipts from within a senator’s state within a given campaign cycle i, between 1984 and 2020, t. Senator represents the set of fixed variables for each individual senator in the model, which do not vary across time. These include whether the senator is a Democrat, Female, a racial or ethnic minority, and what region their state is in, using the Census’ 9-point region classification. We also include an interactive term for senator ideology, which is constant over each senator’s tenure, as estimated by DW-Nominate (Lewis et al., 2022).

Senator Context represents a set of variables specific to each senator, and which vary across the time series for that senator. This includes whether or not the senator is in the majority party at the time of election, whether they are a party leader, or whether they sit on a party committee. To account for changes in relative ideology, we include a measure that captures how far the senator is from the floor median. By senator context, we are also interested in state-specific electoral context: whether it is the senator’s first election to Senate, how many years they have served if running for re-election, and, as described above, the margin of victory in the observed election.

Electoral Context represents a set of variables specific to a given election i and which affect each senator equally. These include three continuous variables: the fourth quarter unemployment figures, the percent of Americans favoring the president’s job approval on September 1st in the year of the election, as tallied by Gallup, and a dollar figure amount representing the Democratic Party’s overall fundraising advantage in that year.

Finally, $α_{i}$ is a vector of senator-level fixed effects that account for systematically unobservable differences between senators within a given year. We cluster standard errors on each senator.

Figure 2 plots the marginal change in the percent each senator is expected to raise from within their state, for a one-unit change in the variables listed across the y-axis. 95% confidence intervals surround the point estimates.

Figure 2.

Marginal relationship between senator-constituency attributes and in-state receipts.

Going through each set of potential explanatory causes, we begin with senator-specific explanations. Democrats are statistically likely to raise money from out-of-state, although once controlling for other variables in the model, the marginal change of being a Democrat is systematically less than what is perhaps suggested in Figure 1; that is, other factors correlated with being a Democrat have higher predictive values than simple partisanship. One of those factors is ideology. Given the interactive term, we derive conditional marginal effects across the ideological spectrum mapped by DW-Nominate (-1, 1); for illustrative purposes Table 1 presents the relationship between ideology and within-state receipts at the mean ideology of the Democratic and Republican Party over the time series.

There is no statistical association for liberal ideology and the percentage of campaign funds raised within the state. However, there is a substantively and significantly large relationship at the average ideological level for Republicans – again, a finding that is perhaps largely driven by the end of the time series, when Republicans are increasingly likely to raise money out of state as their ideology was also becoming more conservative (closer to 1.0).

Demographically, women and racial minorities are less likely to raise money within the state, and their greater representation in the Democratic Party relative to Republicans may also explain why partisanship does not explain much of the variation in in-state receipts. Likewise, geography matters. Historically, senators from New England, “West-North Central” (e.g., North Dakota, Missouri), and the Mountain West (e.g., New Mexico, Montana) are more likely to raise funds from within their state.

Legislative context does little to explain why certain senators rely more on out-of-state donations, but electoral context plays a large part. Senators running for their first election have been systematically more likely to raise funds from within their state, all else equal. Seniority also has a statistically distinguishable relationship; for every additional year serving in the Senate, senators raise one fewer percentage point of their total revenue from within their jurisdiction. As with donors, electorate size matters; larger states make it more likely for senators to raise within the state. Unlike donor motivations, senators do not systematically depend more or less on campaign revenue from within their state the more competitive the election is; although, variables, such as seniority and ideology are often predictive of electoral competitiveness.

Finally, a senator’s relative position vis-à-vis the ideological distribution of the chamber is highly predictive of campaign receipts. The farther one is away from the chamber median, in absolute terms (more liberal or more conservative), the more likely you are to raise money from within the state all else equal.

Changing Nature of Out-of-State Fundraising: Pre/Post-2000

To further explore the changing relationship between out-of-state fundraising and the representation afforded by the U.S. Senate, we constructed separate models for two time periods – 1984–2000, and 2000–2020 – and then calculated the marginal effects for the same set of variables. Although this does not account for the potential correlations between observations across time and cuts down on the number of observations used to compute the estimates, we can derive separate marginal effects for each time period and further consider the contingency of out-of-state fundraising in an era of increasing partisan polarization.

Several patterns are noteworthy in Figure 3, which plots the estimated relationships for each time period. Again, although no causal claim is being made about the drivers of these trends, clear empirical patterns exist in the post-2000 era, as it relates to increasing reliance on out-of-state funds.

Figure 3.

Marginal relationship between senator-constituency attributes and In-State Receipts, Pre/Post 2000 elections.

Ideology, for instance, is largely associated with more recent reliance on out-of-state donations. Prior to 2000, no relationship between ideological extremity (absolute or within the party) existed with the propensity to raise funds out of state. Rather, contextual variables hold the most explanatory value in predicting who raised money in/out of state. Post-2000, however, increasing ideological extremity is associated with increasing likelihood of raising money from outside of state-borders. Moreover, ideology is significant even as ideological polarization is growing. That is, the statistical relationship between ideology and out-of-state fundraising does not appear to be a function of overarching historical patterns, but are rather linked in a systematic way post-2000.

Table 1.

Estimated Marginal Effects of Ideology on Within State Campaign Receipts.

Ideology	$\frac{δ y}{δ x}$	95% Confidence interval
Mean Democrat (−.314)	−.1666	[−.095, .428]
Neutral ideology (.0)	−.0160	[−.194, .162]
Mean Republican (.401)	−.2493	[−.421, −.078]

Just as important, the relationship between electorate size and margin of victory are largely similar pre- and post-2000. Although there may be more competitive elections in an era of closely divided politics, Senators who were in more electorally competitive states were, all things considered, just as likely to raise money out-of-state pre-2000 as they were post-2000. The same is true of electorate size; Senators from larger states have always relied more on in-state contributions than those from smaller states. Regional variation, likewise, appears constant over the time periods, with Senators from New England, the West-North Central regions, and Mountain West consistently more reliant on out-of-state funds than elsewhere.

Discussion and Conclusion

The transformation in the geography of campaign finance, as these data make clear, raises several normative questions about the American political landscape and the evolving roles of senators as representatives of territorial constituencies. The nationalization of campaign donations has occurred in the backdrop of a broader discussion that seeks to encourage candidates to focus less on raising funds and more on the work of legislating. But, to the extent that restrictions on campaign fundraising raise questions about inequality, participation, and speech, such calls have garnered criticism and support from all corners of the political spectrum. The data we present here offer a lens through which to analyze these concerns.

Firstly, we observe changes in campaign finance behavior, with an increasing number of senators reliant on out-of-state donations. The causes and effects of these changes are multifaceted, with implications for legislative behavior, donor influence, and representational equity. While we do not claim a direct causal relationship, it is reasonable to infer that influence is increasingly originating from out-of-state donors. Therefore, the prospects of encouraging home district or state-focused fund-raising are challenged by this evolving dependency. There are few institutional or electoral incentives working in favor of restricting campaign finance along these lines.

On this point, it is worth reiterating the dramatic change that has taken place within the Republican Party. Republican senators were once the most likely to rely on in-state funding, averaging throughout the 1990s well above 60%. But since 2008, Republican senators have become just as reliant on out-of-state fundraising as Democrats. Again, we make no causal claim in our statistical tests of association, which are designed to sort out composition effects, given the state-based nature of our data. However, to the extent that others have also highlighted drastic changes in Republican partisanship since the election of President Barack Obama (e.g., Grossman and Hopkins, 2016), future work may want to consider how these demonstrated shifts in campaign finance activity have contributed to developments within the party system and the Republican Party.

Secondly, the nationalization of campaign donations has profound implications for the Senate’s representational structure. The Senate is a territorial representative institution central to mediating the relationship between federal and state governments. However, as senators increasingly depend on out-of-state funds, they may become more beholden to interests beyond their states’ borders. This development might potentially undercut the Senate’s role in representing territorially grouped constituencies, further complicating the discourse on focusing campaign funding within home districts or states.

One potential consequence of this misrepresentation concerns the fundraising activities of ideologically-extreme legislators. As the Senate becomes more ideologically polarized, the activities of legislators at the far ends of the ideological distribution have become more pronounced. Senators are navigating an increasingly competitive electoral context and leveraging diverse demographic shifts to their advantage. The nationalization of campaign funding potentially offers legislators an avenue to amass campaign resources beyond their home states independent of constituent preference. Whether more ideologically extreme legislators are more likely to receive out-of-state donations (because of a higher national profile) or whether more ideologically extreme donors are more likely to seek out certain types of senators, there is no denying that senators who excessively rely on out-of-state donations are simply of a different sort than those who do not.

The nationalization of campaign finance also generates a representation gap, creating a divide between those thinking nationally and those who perceive their senator as a representative of state-distinctive interests. It is an open empirical question just how much stock the average American places in federalism, when they treat the question of centralization versus decentralization so opportunistically (Jacobs, 2017). State identities may, at times, feel important (Young, 2015), justifying a representative scheme that creates constituencies to represent territorial distinctions. Nationalization, in this case, seems to undercut the very rationale for those territorial constituencies, insofar as senators are more beholden to – and, more likely than not influenced by – out-of-state interests (Rehfeld, 2005).

At the same time, most Americans do not donate to a political campaign and the average individual who does try to influence out of state elections is more likely to be ideologically extreme and partisan (Baker, 2022; Barber et al., 2017). The nationalization of campaign donations is not indicative of the attitudes and behaviors of the average constituent represented in the Senate, but rather the average donor. To the extent that the real representation gap is between those who are “thinking nationally” and those who see their senator as representative of some state-distinctive interest, nationalization creates inequities in influence between these two groups of people: the nationalists and the localists (or statists), not necessarily the wealthy and the not-wealthy.

Political nationalization, therefore, occurs unequally, even as a major decentralizing institution is becoming more beholden to a minority of voters who think and act in purely national terms. To the extent that some scholars have questioned the utility of federal or multi-governmental designs in an age of growing political nationalization and partisan polarization, these data should remind us that the determinants of nationalizing and polarizing behavior are not equally distributed throughout American society. What is clear is that ideological polarization in the United States Senate is increasingly shaped by its federal structure and that any political or institutional salve will also implicate this foundational aspect of constitutional rule by recognizing that the differences that divide Americans not only politically, but also by place.

As such, it remains an open question as to what should be done, since any corrective will make a normative claim on which constituency is most important: a national, potentially more ideologically unrepresentative one, or many parochial ones, that may be less ideologically-driven, but less representative of the nation, as a whole. It is constitutionally ambiguous what steps Congress could take, or even whether the parties themselves could set a regulation on individual candidates’ receipts, if they chose to run under the party banner (Cutler, 1986); restricting out-of-state receipts would alter donors’ incentives, perhaps increasing the appeal of donating to party organizations over individual candidates, limiting the direct influence of out-of-state donors, and enhancing collective party responsibility (Jacobs and Milkis, 2022). Alternatively, in an era of rising campaign costs and increasing competition, no partisan is likely to desire further constraints to the supply of campaign funds they could have at their disposal. Nevertheless, we are witness to a historical transformation in campaign behavior that is central to the country’s ongoing legitimacy crisis – one that implicates debates over how representative American institutions are, how much power imbalance is permittable in a nationalizing political context, and how much the American people really see themselves as a single people.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Nicholas Jacobs

References

Abromowitz

A. I.

Webster

(2016). The rise of negative partisanship and the nationalization of U.S. Elections in the 21^st century. Electoral Studies, 41(1), 12–22.

Baker

A. E.

(2016). Getting short-changed? The impact of outside money on district representation. Social Science Quarterly, 97(5), 1096–1107.

Baker

A. E.

(2022). Policies, profits, networks, or duty? Donors’ motivations for contributing to parties and interest groups. The Social Science Journal, 59(4), 630–645.

Barber

M. J.

Canes-Wrone

Thrower

(2017). Ideologically sophisticated donors: Which candidates do individual contributors finance? American Journal of Political Science, 61(2), 271–288.

Barber

M. J.

Nolan

M. C.

(2016). Causes and consequences of polarization. In Mansbridge

Martin

(Eds.), Political Negotiation: A Handbook (pp. 37–90). Brookings Institution Press.

Bednar

Eskridge

W. N.

Jr. John

(2001). A political theory of federalism. In Ferejohn

Rakove

J. N.

Riley

(Eds), Constitutional culture and democratic rule. Cambridge University Press.

Burke

(2021). Nationalization and its consequences for state legislatures. Social Science Quarterly, 102(1), 269–280.

Canes-Wrone

Gibson

(2019). Developments in congressional responsiveness to donor opinion. In Lee

F. E.

McCarty

(Eds), Can America govern Itself? (pp. 69-92). Cambridge University Press.

Canes-Wrone

Miller

K. M.

(2022). Out-of-district donors and representation in the US House. Legislative Studies Quarterly, 47(2), 361–395.

10.

Caughey

James

Warshaw

(2018). The ideological nationalization of partisan subconstituencies in the American states. Public Choice, 176, 133–151.

11.

Center for Responsive

Politics (2020). District versus Out- of- District. (accessed 1 December 2022).

12.

Corrado

A. J.

Malbin

M. J.

Mann

T. E.

Ornstein

N. J.

(2010). Reform in an age of networked campaigns: How to foster citizen participation through small donors and volunteers. Campaign Finance Institute.

13.

Crespin

Edwards

(2016). Redistricting and individual contributions to congressional candidates. Political Research Quarterly, 69(2), 220–232.

14.

Cutler

L. N.

(1986). Can the parties regulate campaign financing? The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 486, 115–120.

15.

Derthick

(2001). Keeping the Compound Republic: Essays on American Federalism. Brookings Institution Press.

16.

Ensley

M. J.

(2009). Individual campaign contributions and candidate ideology. Public Choice, 138(1), 221–238.

17.

FEC (2016). FEC Discusses New Initiatives to Improve Compliance and Disclosure.

18.

Gailmard

Jenkins

J. A.

(2009). Agency problems, the 17th Amendment, and representation in the Senate. American Journal of Political Science, 53(2), 324–342.

19.

Gimpel

J. G.

Lee

F. E.

Kaminski

(2006). The political geography of campaign contributions in American politics. The Journal of Politics, 68(3), 626–639.

20.

Gimpel

J. G.

Lee

F. E.

Pearson-Merkowitz

(2008). The check is in the mail: Interdistrict funding flows in congressional elections. American Journal of Political Science, 52(2), 373–394.

21.

Grenzke

(1988). Comparing contributions to U. S. House members from outside their districts. Legislative Studies Quarterly, 13(1), 83–108.

22.

Grossmann

Hopkins

D. A.

(2016). Asymmetric Politics: Ideological Republicans and Group Interest Democrats. Oxford University Press.

23.

Hersh

(2020). Politics is for Power: How to Move Beyond Political Hobbyism, Take Action, and Make Real Change. Simon and Shuster.

24.

Hertel-Fernandez

(2019). State Capture: How Conservative Activists, Big Businesses, And Wealthy Donors Reshaped The American States--And The Nation. Oxford University Press.

25.

Hopkins

D. J.

(2018). The Increasingly United States: How and Why American Political Behavior Nationalized. The University of Chicago Press.

26.

Hopkins

D. J.

Schickler

Azizi

D. L.

(2022). From many divides, one? The polarization and nationalization of American state party platforms, 1918-2017. Studies in American Political Development, 36(1), 1–20.

27.

Iyengar

Lelkes

Levendusky

Malhotra

Westwood

S. J.

(2018). The origins and consequences of affective polarization in the United States. Annual Review of Political Science, 22, 7.

28.

Jacobs

N. F.

(2017). An experimental test of how Americans think about federalism. Publius: The Journal of Federalism, 47(4), 572–598.

29.

Jacobs

N. F.

Milkis

S. M.

(2022). What Happened to the Vital Center? Presidentialism, Populist Revolt, and the Fracturing of America. Oxford University Press.

30.

Jacobson

G. C.

(2019). Presidents and Parties in the Public Mind. University of Chicago Press.

31.

Kincaid

Cole

(2018). Attachments to multiple communities, trust in governments, political polarization, and public attitudes toward immigration in the United States. In Jack

Kincaid

(Eds), Identities, Trust, and Cohesion in federal systems: Public perspectives. Montreal and Kingston (pp. 147–180). McGill-Queen's University Press.

32.

La Raja

R. J.

Schaffner

B. F.

(2015). Campaign Finance and Political Polarization: When Purists Prevail. University of Michigan Press.

33.

La Raja

R. J.

Schaffner

B. F.

(2015). Campaign finance and political polarizaiton: When pursuits prevail. University of Michigan Press.

34.

Lee

F. E.

(2009). Beyond Ideology: Politics, Principles, and Partisanship in the U.S. Senate. University of Chicago Press.

35.

Lee

F. E.

(2016). Patronage, logrolls, and “polarization”: Congressional parties of the Gilded Age, 1876–1896. Studies in American Political Development, 30(2), 116–127.

36.

Lewis

J. B.

Poole

Rosenthal

Adam

Rudkin

Sonnet

(2022). Voteview: Congressional Roll-call Votes Database. https://voteview.com/

37.

Magleby

D. B.

Goodliffe

Olsen

J. A.

(2018). Who Donates in Campaigns? The Importance of Message, Medium, and Structure. Cambridge University Press.

38.

Mutch

R. E.

(2016). Campaign Finance: What Everyone needs to Know. Oxford University Press.

39.

Pears

Sydnor

(2022). The correlates and characteristics of American state identity. Publius: The Journal of Federalism, 52(2), 173–200.

40.

Pierson

Schickler

(2020). Madison’s constitution under stress: A developmental analysis of political polarization. Annual Review of Political Science, 23, 37–58.

41.

Rakove

J. N.

(1987). The great compromise: Ideas, interests, and the politics of constitution making. William and Mary Quarterly, 44(3), 424–457. https://doi.org/10.2307/1939765 (accessed 18 May 2022).

42.

Rehfeld

(2005). The concept of constituency: Political representation, democratic legitimacy, and institutional design. Cambridge University Press.

43.

Reynolds

M. E.

Hall

R. L.

(2019). Financing the 2016 congressional election. In Magleby

D. B.

(Ed), Financing the 2016 election (pp. 217–248). Brookings Institution Press.

44.

Rhodes

J. H.

Schaffner

B. F.

La Raja

R. J.

(2016). Financial capacity and strategic Investors in an era of deregulation. https://scholars.org/sites/scholars/files/schaffner_financial_capacity_and_strategic_investors_in_an_era_of_deregulation.pdf

45.

Riker

W. H.

(1955). The senate and American federalism. American Political Science Review, 49(2), 452–469.

46.

Riker

(1987). The development of American fedearlism. Kluwer Academic Publishers.

47.

Rubenstein

(2022). Small money donating as democratic politics. Perspectives on Politics, 20(3), 965–982.

48.

Smith

S. S.

Ostrander

Pope

C. M.

(2013). Majority party power and procedural motions in the U.S. Senate. Legislative Studies Quarterly, 38, 205–236.

49.

Truman

(1985). Party reform, party atrophy, and constitutional change: Some reflections. Political Science Quarterly, 99(4), 637–655.

50.

Volden

(2004). Origin, operation, and significance: The federalism of William H. Riker. Publius: The Journal of Federalism, 34(4), 89–107.

51.

Young

(2015). The volk of New Jersey? State identity, distinctiveness, and political culture in the American federal system. Duke Law Scholarship Repository.

52.

Zingher

J. N.

Jesse

(2018). Polarization and the nationalization of state legislative elections. American Politics Research, 47(5), 1036–1054.