Gender Inequalities in Campaign Finance

Previous research suggests that female candidates do not face fundraising barriers; however, female politicians consistently report that fundraising is more difficult for them than their male colleagues. Using a regression discontinuity design to hold district characteristics constant, we study whether there is a gender gap in campaign fundraising for state legislators from 1990 to 2010. We find that male candidates raise substantially more money than female candidates. Further, male donors give more money to male candidates, while female donors, political parties, and PACs give approximately equally to men and women. At the same time, men face challengers who raise more money; consequently, male and female incumbents do not differ in the proportion of the overall district money that they raise in their next reelection bid. These results suggest that there are gender inequalities in campaign finance, but they may not have immediate consequence for women’s representation. * Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT 84602. Email: [email protected] † Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Washington University in St. Louis, MO 63130. Email: [email protected] ‡ Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT 84602. Email: [email protected] 2 Women are significantly underrepresented in state legislatures around the United States. Nationally, women hold 25% of the seats in state legislative lower chambers and twenty two percent of state Senate seats.§ Research suggests that this has implications for both the style and substance of policymaking (Karpowitz and Mendelberg 2014; Kathlene 1994; Swers 2002; Volden, Wiseman, and Wittmer 2013). Numerous scholars have sought to explain the gender gap in political representation, with many scholars focusing on men’s and women’s differential levels of political ambition, responsiveness to recruitment, and tolerance for competition (Fox and Lawless 2005; 2011; Kanthak and Woon 2015; Lawless and Fox 2010; Preece and Stoddard 2015; Preece, Stoddard, and Fisher 2015) and political parties’ differential levels of support for male and female candidates (Crowder-Meyer 2013; Kanthak and Krause 2012; Sanbonmatsu 2006). On the other hand, existing evidence suggests that the campaign and election process itself does not disadvantage women (Brooks 2013; Dolan 2010; Hayes and Lawless 2015). In particular, the literature on gender and campaign finance fails to find much support for the idea that female candidates are disadvantaged in raising funds, suggesting that campaign finance has little to do with women’s underrepresentation. However, female politicians consistently report that fundraising is more difficult for them than their male colleagues. These candidates often identify male-dominated social networks as being one of the largest barriers to parity (Carroll and Sanbonmatsu 2013; Lawless and Fox 2010). Are female politicians mistaken in their perceptions? Or, is it possible that the existing literature has simply failed to detect the ways in which a candidate’s sex matters for campaign finance? § http://www.cawp.rutgers.edu/fast_facts/levels_of_office/documents/stleg.pdf 3 In this paper, we identify two challenges with the literature that could produce the existing null results and seek to rectify them with our analysis. First, most scholars compare the amount of money male and female candidates raise. Although this is an important operationalization of the gender gap, it is not the only possible one. We offer several additional ways to measure how a candidate’s sex influences campaign finance by looking at the ratio of campaign spending and who donates to whom, as well as the total amount of money spent in the race. Second, we suggest that existing studies suffer from omitted variable bias because men and women run in very different kinds of districts. We mitigate this problem by using a regression discontinuity (RD) design, which focuses on races between male and female state legislative candidates who run in districts that are otherwise similar (Anastasopoulos n.d.; Broockman 2014). By comparing the money that male and female barely-winning candidates raise in their next race, we are able to hold district and electoral factors constant and then measure the impact of having a male versus a female incumbent. Although our design uses only a small subset of all state legislative races, these close races are precisely the races in which gender differences in campaign finance could actually affect the proportion of women in the state legislature. In these crucial marginal cases, we find that male candidates raise between 80% and 125% more than female candidates in their next election. As female state legislators claimed in interviews, most of this difference comes from individual male donors; female donors, political parties, and PACs give approximately equally to male and female candidates. However, male and female barelywinning incumbents both raise approximately the same proportion (just over 60 percent) of