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Abstract
The authors revisit the gender gap in campaign finance and find an advantage for women candidates in earning donations from individual donors due to the activities of female donor networks and the changing congressional donor pool. Women supported by these networks, especially Democratic women, receive a boost in campaign fundraising compared to their male counterparts, whereas women not supported by these networks receive significantly less. The ideological leanings of congressional donors also advantage Democratic women. Substantial partisan gender differences in this area of campaign finance persist, and this fund-raising gap may contribute to the growing partisan gender gap in Congress.
Keywords
American politics, women and politics, legislative studies
Gains in women's congressional representation have had a strong Democratic bias, and this partisan gap between Republican and Democratic congressional women is predicted to widen (Elder 2008). Explanations for this gap include a paucity of Republican women in the pipeline of state legislative office, a regional realignment that has led to the defeat of Republican representatives, and the high success levels of minority women who disproportionately run as Democrats (Elder 2008). Another possibility for this partisan gender gap may be differences in fundraising capabilities among these candidates. We find that real campaign finance differences between Democratic and Republican women exist, and these differences stem from the activities of female donor networks and the ideological leanings of individual donors in the congressional donor pool. Because networks and donors favor liberal Democratic women, campaign finance may help explain this partisan gender gap among women in Congress.
Individual donors to congressional races contribute slightly more than half of all campaign dollars (Herrnson 2004), and as such, these donors have a genuine opportunity to affect the electoral fortunes of candidates. Because money is a necessary condition for winning elections (Jacobson 1980), campaign fund-raising remains a focus of research examining the causes of women's underrepresentation in Congress (e.g., Burrell 2005; Fiber and Fox 2005). Work on gender bias in campaign fund-raising has concluded that men and women candidates raise the same amount of total campaign dollars (Uhlaner and Scholzman 1986; Burrell 1994).1 However, it is possible that these candidates are taking different paths to achieve this outcome, emphasizing different sources of campaign funds. Women candidates cite their reliance on individual...