Nathan, Charles, Curtis Bram, Arvind Krishnamurthy, and Jason Douglas Todd. May 6, 2024. “The Donor Went Down to Georgia: Out-of-District Donations and Rivalrous Representation.” Political Behavior.
Most money spent in US congressional campaigns comes from donors outside a race’s electoral district. Scholars argue that representatives accepting out-of-district donations become “surrogate representatives” for outside donors. Yet researchers neglect a critical question: how do geographic constituents react when their representatives accept money from out-of-district donors? We argue that geographic constituents feel forced to “share” their representatives with outside donors at the expense of their own representation. In an experiment during Georgia’s 2021 Special Senate Election, Georgians who learned about out-of-district donations to particular candidates expected representatives to spend less time and effort working for Georgians. A second experiment during the 2022 Senate elections identified the causal mechanism: local identity. Respondents whose local identity was primed and learned about out-of-district donations expected representatives to spend less time and effort working for them. Our findings highlight the rivalrous nature of representation and the tradeoffs accompanying out-of-district donations and surrogate representation.
