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Money is central in US politics, and most campaign contributions stem from a tiny, wealthy elite. Like other political acts, campaign donations are known to be socially contagious. We study how campaign donations diffuse through a network of more than 50 000 elites and examine how connectivity among previous donors reinforces contagion. We find that the diffusion of donations is driven by independent reinforcement contagion: people are more likely to donate when exposed to donors from different social groups than when they are exposed to equally many donors from the same group. Counter-intuitively, being exposed to one side may increase donations to the other side. Although the effect is weak, simultaneous cross-cutting exposure makes donation somewhat less likely. Finally, the independence of donors in the beginning of a campaign predicts the amount of money that is raised throughout a campaign. We theorize that people infer population-wide estimates from their local observations, with elites assessing the viability of candidates, possibly opposing candidates in response to local support. Our findings suggest that theories of complex contagions need refinement and that political campaigns should target multiple communities.

Stephen Colbert hosts a comedy television program called The Colbert
Report (the t at the end is silent—both of them!) in which he
parodies personality-based news shows like The O'Reilly Factor that have
become popular during the last 10 years. In an effort to make fun of these (usually
conservative) personalities who engage in non-stop self-promotion, Colbert frequently trades
outlandish claims for laughs. Among these is the claim that anyone who comes on the
Report receives the "Colbert bump," immediately vaulting the guest to
stardom, fame, and fortune. Like Midas turning everything he touches to gold, Stephen
Colbert can turn losers into winners, just by interviewing them on his show (but, ahem, he
would never actually interview a loser now would he?).

While existing work has demonstrated that campaign donations can buy access to benefits such as favorable legislation and preferential contracting, we highlight another use of campaign contributions: buying reductions in regulatory enforcement. Specifically, we argue that in return for campaign contributions, Colombian mayors who rely on donor-funding (compared with those who do not) choose not to enforce sanctions against illegal deforestation activities. Using a regression discontinuity design, we show that deforestation is significantly higher in municipalities that elect donor-funded as opposed to self-funded politicians. Further analysis shows that only part of this effect can be explained by differences in contracting practices by donor-funded mayors. Instead, evidence of heterogeneity in the effects according to the presence of alternative formal and informal enforcement institutions, and analysis of fire clearance, support the interpretation that campaign contributions buy reductions in the enforcement of environmental regulations.

When firms give money to candidates for public office, what return can they expect on their investment? Prior studies have been inconclusive, due to both methodological challenges and unique features of the U.S. political context on which they have focused. Using data from Brazil, we employ a regression discontinuity design to identify the effect of an electoral victory on government contracts for a candidate's corporate donors. Firms specializing in public works projects can expect a substantial boost in contracts—at least 14 times the value of their contributions—when they donate to a federal deputy candidate from the ruling Workers' Party (PT) and that candidate wins office. We find no effects among allied parties, indicating that the PT prioritizes this form of state spending for party strengthening rather than coalition management.

Recent scholarship on the effect of candidate visits in presidential elections has found that appearances by candidates appear to mobilize both supporters and opponents. Specifically, in the 2016 presidential election, donations to campaigns of the visiting presidential candidates increased, but—in the case of Republican nominee Donald Trump—so did donations to his opponent, Hillary Clinton. In this paper, we extend this research by assessing the effect of visits on campaign donations by presidential and vice presidential candidates in the 2020 election. We find evidence that visits by Donald Trump and Kamala Harris had strong mobilizing and counter-mobilizing effects, increasing donations to both campaigns. We find weak evidence that visits by Joe Biden increased contributions to his campaign, but we do not find evidence that his visits had a counter-mobilizing effect, and we find no evidence that visits by Mike Pence affected donations in either direction.