Donor activity is associated with US legislators’ attention to political issues

Abstract

Campaign contributions are a staple of congressional life. Yet, the search for tangible effects of congressional donations often focuses on the association between contributions and votes on congressional bills. We present an alternative approach by considering the relationship between money and legislators’ speech. Floor speeches are an important component of congressional behavior, and reflect a legislator’s policy priorities and positions in a way that voting cannot. Our research provides the first comprehensive analysis of the association between a legislator’s campaign donors and the policy issues they prioritize with congressional speech. Ultimately, we find a robust relationship between donors and speech, indicating a more pervasive role of money in politics than previously assumed. We use a machine learning framework on a new dataset that brings together legislator metadata for all representatives in the US House between 1995 and 2018, including committee assignments, legislative speech, donation records, and information about Political Action Committees. We compare information about donations against other potential explanatory variables, such as party affiliation, home state, and committee assignments, and find that donors consistently have the strongest association with legislators’ issue-attention. We further contribute a procedure for identifying speech and donation events that occur in close proximity to one another and share meaningful connections, identifying the proverbial needles in the haystack of speech and donation activity in Congress which may be cases of interest for investigative journalism. Taken together, our framework, data, and findings can help increase the transparency of the role of money in politics.