Since the 1974 Federal Election Campaign Act began to require political committees that participate in federal elections to report their financial transactions, political scientists have learned much about the behavior of organizations that spend money in House and Senate campaigns. Using Federal Election Commission (FEC) data, scholars have traced changes in the contribution behavior of PACs and parties over time. Some political scientists have also interviewed and surveyed PAC directors and party officials to learn about the goals, strategies, and decisionmaking processes of these actors.
 

Much less is known, however, about the motives, strategies, and contribution decisions of individuals. To date, there have been no major investigations of individual donors to congressional candidates, who still comprise the largest source of money in congressional election campaigns. Our proposed book will fill a gaping hole in the research on money and politics by providing a comprehensive, in-depth investigation of individual contributors to congressional candidates.
 

This study is important for several reasons. First, individuals are the source of the vast majority of the money that parties and PACs spend in elections, and they directly contribute more than half of the money raised directly by all congressional candidates. Thus an investigation of individual contributors can help us better understand the original source of campaign funds and how the efforts of parties, PACs, and professional fundraisers channel money to particular candidates. For example, relatively little is known about the effect of electoral information and decision making cues provided by parties and PACs on the contribution decisions of individuals who spend large sums of money in politics. Even less is known about the motives of individuals who make campaign contributions sporadically.
 

Second, contributing is a form of political participation, and campaign contributors have greater voice in policymaking than other Americans. It is therefore important to investigate the attitudes, motives, and behaviors of campaign contributors in order to better understand the way that private financing gives some citizens greater voice in democracy than others. Our preliminary results from the 1996 survey show that more than three-quarters of contributors have contacted at least one member of Congress in the past two years, and that more than half have contacted two or more. A majority know personally their House member, and a third know personally both Senators. Clearly contributors have easy access to members, and can are therefore in a better position than average citizens to voice their concerns to lawmakers.
 

Making campaign contributions is a relatively rare but significant form of participation, and those who give are different from other Americans. Our preliminary results from a survey of 1996 contributors shows that 80% of those who gave $200 or more are male; 95% are white; less than 1% are African-American; 55% have training beyond a college degree, and more than a quarter have incomes of over $250,000. Our survey of the most active contributors is still in the field, but preliminary results suggest that this group is even more unrepresentative of the general public.
 

We will be able to make some concrete statements about potential biases in the policy making process that result from the private financing of campaigns once we analyze the policy preferences of individual contributors and compare them with those of the general public. Our surveys contain a rich array of issue preference questions, many directly comparable to other national surveys. Our preliminary results suggest that contributors are generally liberal on social issues (a plurality would allow gays to teach in public schools, a majority wants abortion legal and a vast majority wants women to play an equal role in business and government), but economically conservative (majorities want to cut taxes and services, oppose additional environmental regulations, national health insurance, and more spending to reduce poverty). Thus we can assess the distinctiveness of contributors, and make some statements about the things they ask from the political system. This aspect of the study has important implications for the nature of representation in the political system.
 

Finally, the motives and roles of individual contributors lie at the heart of a growing debate about campaign finance reform. Recently, scholars, politicians, journalists, and even campaign finance practitioners seemed to reach a consensus that the current system of financing House and Senate campaigns is in crisis. The original system, established by the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1974, was never fully implemented. By the 1990s the cumulative impact of Supreme Court decisions, amendments passed by Congress, regulatory decisions reached by the FEC, and innovative practices by fundraising professionals had opened large cracks in the regulatory structure. In 1996 coalitions of interest groups spent millions of dollars on soft money "issue advocacy" advertisements that targeted House and Senate races. In some cases, these groups spent more money than the candidates themselves in attempts to link candidates to controversial issues without violating the law by explicitly calling for their defeat. As a consequence, a substantial portion of the 1996 elections were financed using money from interest group treasuries, which are not reported to the Federal Election Commission.
 

Although it is very unlikely that Congress will pass serious campaign finance reform in this session, it is clear that reform is on the Asystemic agenda.@ Major newspapers continue to probe into financial irregularities by both parties, think tanks have dedicated money to campaign finance reform, teams of scholars have labored hard to produce reform proposals, and polls show that the public is extremely cynical of the current system and supportive of reform. Although none of the more than 70 reform proposals in the 105th Congress are likely to become law, pressure appears to be mounting for another of America=s episodic reform efforts. We believe that after the 1998 elections such pressure will increase substantially.
 

Much of the debate about campaign finance has contrasted Agood@ sources of political money B generally contributions raised from individuals within a candidate's state or district B with Abad@ sources B principally interest group contributions and soft money. Many reform proposals call for increasing the role of individual contributors by raising the limit on contributions, providing tax incentives for individual contributions, and making in-district individual contributions more valuable. Other reform proposals would indirectly increase the importance of individual contributions by reducing or eliminating PAC contributions and banning large Asoft money@ contributions.
 

Yet the history of campaign finance reform shows that reforms can often yield unexpected consequences. When organized labor insisted on allowing political action committees to gather and distribute money in congressional elections, they did not foresee a system in which corporate and trade association PACs play a major role in elections. When reformers argued that allowing state and local parties to raise and spend soft money outside of the federal limits on "generic" party-focused advertisements and grass-roots activities would invigorate local democracy, they did not anticipate the hundreds of millions of unregulated dollars that would be collected from corporations, unions, and wealthy individuals and spent on issue advocacy campaigns.
 

It is quite possible that some current reform proposals could have similarly unanticipated effects if adopted. A better understanding of the motives and decisions of individuals would be extremely valuable to those who seek to reform the campaign finance system. Consider, for example, proposals to ban or limit PAC contributions. If the universe of large campaign contributors is dominated by those who primarily seek to support local candidates, then eliminating PACs may well result in candidates running in wealthy districts possessing nearly unlimited campaign cash, while those who run in poor districts lack the funds to adequately communicate with voters. If most large contributors are corporate executives who seek access to members of Congress, however, then banning PACs will encourage these individuals to make more contributions directly to candidates, perhaps following the guidance of a corporate lobbyist or public affairs representative who bundles their contributions. As a result, candidates would be able to identify the political interests that are the source of the contributions, but journalists, researchers, and citizens who rely on FEC public records and the general public would not.
 

We have undertaken an ambitious project that relies on several sources of data. Last year we mailed 6,000 surveys to different groups of congressional contributors who gave at least $200 to at least one congressional candidate. One sets of contributors was surveyed in 1978, and our survey of these contributors therefore creates a panel study of contributors that spans most of the period of the FECA system. We have also surveyed a random sample of individuals who made donations in the 1996 elections, allowing us to answer some important questions about the development of the contributor pool over the last 30 years. Have congressional contributors become "more like America" over time? Are there more women, minorities, and less affluent citizens giving money than before, or has the contributor pool remained constant, consisting primarily of wealthy white men? Have the motives that drive contributing changed in the past 30 years as interest groups have sought to expand the percentage of their members who participate in the financing of elections? These are a few of the questions this study will address.
 

A final group which we surveyed consists of individuals who gave the largest sums of money to congressional candidates in the 1990s. It will enable us to compare the motives and policy goals of big givers to small givers and those who choose not to make campaign contributions. It will also enable us to explore the networks that have developed among campaign finance elites.
 

These surveys will provide a rich picture of the motivations, policy preferences, and strategies of congressional donors. We will investigate the contribution histories of these donors, along with the range of their political activities, their contacts with members of Congress, whether they solicit others to give, where they get information about candidates and races, whether they give soft money, their professions, and their attitudes toward the campaign finance system and possible reforms.
 

We will supplement the survey data with detailed records of each individual's campaign contributions. We will trace changes in contribution behavior as a result of the change in party control of the Senate in 1980 and 1986 and the Republican takeover of both chambers of Congress in 1994. We will search for evidence of strategic giving among strong partisans as the likely prospects of their party wax and wane across election cycles. In addition, we will interview fundraising officials in Washington and conduct in-depth interviews with contributors. We are preparing now to conduct in-depth phone interviews with 20 contributors who represent distinctive types of contributors. These qualitative data will provide us with illustrations of attitudes toward the role of money in politics and allow for a more colorful and lively book.
 

Our project has been supported by generous grants from the Joyce Foundation, and additional support from the National Science Foundation, the Citizen's Research Foundation, the Dirkson Center, and our various institutions. We hope to complete a draft of the book by January, 1999.
 

There is no book that would directly compete with this one, although there are other books that investigate similar issues, many of them by one or more of us. Powell and Wilcox (along with Clifford Brown) explored individual contributors to presidential campaigns in Serious Money: Fundraising and Contributing in Presidential Nomination Campaigns. (Cambridge, 1995). Herrnson has described the financing of congressional campaigns in Party Campaigning in the 1980s (Harvard, 1988) and Congressional Elections: Campaigning at Home and in Washington (CQ Press, 2^nd edition 1998). Biersack, Herrnson and Wilcox have explored the motivations of PACs in congressional elections in their edited volume Risky Business? PAC Decisionmaking in Congressional Elections (M.E. Sharpe, 1995) and their forthcoming book After the Revolution: Interest Groups and Lobbying in the New Republican Congress (Allyn & Bacon, 1998). Wilcox (with Mark Rozell) examines the roles of interest groups in financing congressional elections in Interest Groups in American Elections (CQ Press, forthcoming). Gary Jacobson, Frank Sorauf, and others have touched on the behavior of individual donors to congressional races in their various excellent books, but no other book provides a detailed investigation of individual contributors to congressional candidates.
 
 

Chapter Outline
 

I. Introduction: Why Individual Donors Matter
 

In this chapter we will discuss the role of individual campaign contributors in contemporary politics, drawing on the literature on political participation, organization, and campaigns. We will begin with an analysis of the contemporary campaign finance system as it has evolved from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, discussing the legal, political, social forces that have influenced contribution behavior. We will next review existing research on contributors, including the limited literature on congressional donors. We will provide aggregate information on individual contributions throughout the 1978-1996 period, and set congressional donors in the context of theoretical questions about the operation of the Congress at the end of the twentieth century. This chapter will end with a brief description of the data sets employed in the book.
 
 

2. The Contributor Pool
 

We find that donors to congressional campaigns constitute a relatively stable pool of activists - many of whom give regularly at all levels of government, others of whom give intermittently to members in their own state or district. In this chapter, we will profile this pool of donors in 1978 and in 1996, and show how the pool of contributors has subtly changed over time. We will also compare congressional contributors to other sets of contributors, drawn from some of our other surveys of contributors to presidential candidates, to party committees, and to ideological PACs, and to contributors identified by the National Election Studies in 1996.
 

We will describe the important demographic characteristics of congressional donors, and discuss their partisanship, ideology, issue positions, and other forms of political participation.

Our preliminary results indicate that the contributor pool is composed primarily of wealthy, well-educated, white businessmen in 1996. They are overwhelmingly Republican, moderately conservative, and generally more secular than the general public.
 

3.) Varieties of Donors
 

Contributors and other activists are generally motivated by a mix of three goals: to gain economic benefits (material), to influence policy and elections (purposive), and to gain social interactions (solidary). Our survey included a variety of questions that directly and indirectly tap the motives of contributors, and that assess which factors are most important in their decision to contribute to specific candidates. Using data from our 1996 survey, we have developed a preliminary typology of six distinct types of donors: business donors who give to retain access to members of Congress and to assure that their business is treated well, partisan donors who give to help their party win close elections, donors motivated by personal contact - either solicitations from someone to whom they cannot say no, or an invitation to an event, local donors who give to candidates they know in their state, ideological donors who give to candidates supported by issue groups or who shares their position on one or more issues, and donors who give to candidates who are sure winners and have positions of power in Congress.
 

In this chapter we will connect this typology to contributor characteristics discussed in Chapter 2 - demographic variables, partisanship, ideology, and political participation. This typology will be central to the analysis for much of the rest of the book.
 

4.) Varieties of recipients
 

In this chapter we focus on the recipient of congressional donations. We begin by discussing the characteristics of candidates that affects their ability to raise individual contributions, and use aggregate data from the Federal Election Commission to show which kinds of candidates receive the most contributions. We will focus on candidate status (incumbent, challenger, open seat candidate), the electoral situation (competitive or not), the institutional position of the incumbent (committee power, leadership roles), party affiliation, and issue positions.
 

We will then examine fundraising strategies of various types of candidates: how do different types of candidates use their resources to attract individual contributions? This part of the analysis will draw on in-depth interviews conducted with congressional fundraisers in the Washignton, D.C. area. Finally, we will connect the types of candidates to the types of contributors, and show how various types of candidates choose strategies to appeal to different types of donors.
 

5. Patterns of giving
 

This chapter will investigate the basic patterns of contributing. We begin with an examination of the decision to contribute to specific candidates in 1996. Our survey asked respondents which candidates had asked for their contributions, and to which candidates they gave. We can therefore investigate the factors that lead contributors to respond to specific solicitations. We will then use data from actual contributions recorded by the Federal Election Commission to examine the dynamics of contributions over time. Some contributors give regularly to the same candidates in every election cycle, while others respond to the strategic environment by giving to promising non-incumbent candidates in election cycles that advantage their party, and to vulnerable incumbents when the other party is advantaged. The 1990s are an ideal period to investigate the dynamics of contributions, for the 1992-1996 period involved great uncertainty while 1990 was a typical off-year election.
 

6.) The Contribution decision
 

Our survey includes a number of items that allow us to carefully investigate the decision to contribute. Our data suggest that most contributors are asked by several candidates to give to their campaigns, and in each case they must decide to give or not to give. Respondents have told us who asked them for money, and to whom the gave. This allows us to compare the role of ideological proximity, committee assignments, geography, and other factors in the contribution decision. We will examine the decision separately for each type of contributor. We expect to find that different factors influence the contribution decisions of different types of donors.
 

In this chapter we will also investigate the role of cue-giving by political actors. Our survey asked contributors about their regular sources of political information, and which ones regularly influenced their contribution decisions. We need not rely entirely on survey data, however, for we can empirically investigate whether corporate executives give to the same candidates as their PACs, for example.

6.) Contributions, Access, and Voice
 

Our data suggest that a majority of congressional donors regularly contact members of Congress, and that most know personally their own Representative. We begin by examining the types of contacts between contributors and members, showing how the amount and nature of contacting varies across various types of contributors. We will assess the factors that determines just how often contributors contact members of Congress, both those that represent them geographically and those who do not. Our survey allow us to systematically examine which contributors contacted their own Senators and representatives, and model that decision. Moreover, we can determine whether contributors regularly give money to those incumbents who they contact for help with legislation.
 

We will then examine the systematic bias that results from the unequal access accorded to frequent donors. Here we will compare the policy views of regular donors, sporadic donors, and non-contributors (using data from national surveys). We will conclude by discussing what contributors may get from their gifts.
 

7.) Campaign finance reform
 

Our survey includes a battery of questions that assess contributor attitudes toward the existing campaign finance system and possible reforms. Our preliminary results suggests that many contributors are unhappy with the current system of financing campaigns because they often feel pressured to make political donations. More than ¾ of contributors believed that officeholders regularly pressure contributors for contributions, and nearly 60% believe that contributors likewise pressure officeholders for favors. Fully 77% want to end soft money, and 68% would limit spending for Congressional candidates. Others, however, willingly circumvent the Federal Election Campaign Act's contribution limits in order to make soft money contributions to parties. We will assess support for various reform proposals, and compare these attitudes to motivations and patterns of giving to candidates, PACs, and parties. We will discuss contributors' answers to questions about how they will change their behavior if specific campaign finance reforms are adopted. We will supplement our survey data with personal, in-depth interviews with contributors who represent each cell of our typology.
 
 

8.) Conclusions
 

In this chapter we will summarize our major results and consider their implications for elections, campaign finance reform, and the workings of American democracy. We will also raise issues of democratic governance, and about equality and voice.
 
 

About the authors:
 

Robert Biersack is Supervisory Statistician at the Federal Election Commission and adjunct Lecturer of Political Science at Catholic University. He has written extensively on congressional elections, political parties, and campaign finance, and is co-editor of Risky Business? PAC Decisionmaking in Congressional Elections (M.E. Sharpe, 1994) and Interest Groups and Lobbying in the New Republican Congress (Allyn & Bacon, 1998).
 

Paul S. Herrnson is professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland.

Herrnson is the author of Congressional Elections: Campaigning at Home and in Washington (CQ Press, 2^nd edition, 1998) and Party Campaigning in the 1980s (Harvard, 1988.) He is co-editor of Risky Business? PAC Decisionmaking in Congressional Elections (M.E. Sharpe, 1994), Interest Groups and Lobbying in the New Republican Congress (Allyn & Bacon, 1998) and The Interest Group Connection: Electioneering, Lobbying, and Policy Making in Washington (Chatham House, 1997). He has written numerous articles and book chapters on Congress, political parties, and elections, and campaign finance, has served as an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow, and has testified before Congress and the Maryland state legislature on campaign finance issues.
 

John C. Green is professor of Political Science and Director of the Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron. He is co-author of Religion and the Culture Wars (Rowman & Littlefield, 1996) and The Bully Pulpit: The Politics of the Protestant Clergy (University Press of Kansas, 1997) as well as numerous articles of religion and politics.
 

Lynda Powell is professor of Political Science at the University of Rochester. Powell is a co-author of Serious Money: Fundraising and Contributing in Presidential Nomination Campaigns (Cambridge, 1995). Her published research includes a number of articles and chapters on individual contributors to presidential and congressional campaigns.
 

Clyde Wilcox is professor of government at Georgetown University. His recent books in the field of campaign finance include Serious Money: Fundraising and Contributing in Presidential Nomination Campaigns (Cambridge, 1995), Risky Business? PAC Decisionmaking in Congressional Elections (M.E. Sharpe, 1994), Interest Groups and Lobbying in the New Republican Congress (Allyn & Bacon, 1998), and Interest Groups in National Elections (CQ, 1998). He also writes on religion and politics, gender politics, and other topics.