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

• Published date: 01 May 2024
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/1532673X231220639
• Author: Nicholas Jacobs,Wasike Gil Imboywa
• Date: 01 May 2024

Article

American Politics Research

2024, Vol. 52(3) 239–248

© The Author(s) 2023

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DOI: 10.1177/1532673X231220639

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The Nationalization of Individual Campaign

Contributions in U.S. Senate Elections,

1984-2020

Nicholas Jacobs

1

and Wasike Gil Imboywa

1

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-statedonations,

with regional differences also evident. We argue that the nationalization of campaign f‌inance challenges the Senate’s repre-

sentative 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 soluti on 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 in-

stitution. Federalism requires that “national forces must be

structurally restrained from infringing on the federal

bargain,”and the Senate is central to that institutional ar-

rangement (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 nationali-

zation 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 national-

izing 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’sownstate(Corrado et al., 2010;

Rubenstein, 2022). Using data from over 130-million

individual-level campaign donations, we elaborate on the na-

tionalization 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).

1

Colby College, Waterville, ME, USA

Corresponding Author:

Nicholas Jacobs, Colby College, 4000 Mayf‌lower Hill Drive, Diamond Hall

259, Waterville, ME 04901, USA.

Email: nfjacobs@colby.edu