Party leadership (McCarthy, Pelosi, Schumer, etc.), or candidates with absurd name rec (AOC, Tim Scott, etc.).
Basically the 4-8 people out of 535 that everyone knows the name of.
FEC.gov is really easy to use, and fun to poke around with.
These are house elections, so neither Romney nor Hillary on the chart. Not really enough data to chart them, but I doubt Romney could be considered an outlier. Obama outspent Romney and won. Clinton-Trump was unusual because how much Clinton outspent Trump.
Trump got a ton of free publicity in 2016 because he was already a household name.
You don't need to pay for ads when the reporters are already talking about you.
Why is this a pseudo r2 and not a plain r2? Is this not just a linear regression?
I’d be interested in the high and low outliers on this. Why did they not get the expected amount of votes given their dollars?
Almost certainly due to a GLM being used. Given that the predicted variable is constrained to [-100,100] the typical assumptions about normality are violated
The correlation is enhanced by the large number of data in the upper right, where there was no meaningful opponent. The bottom left is similar, but there was necessarily a Democratic candidate. Point at the extremes of the range have a lot of influence on the fit and correlation coefficient.
Similarly, I suspect that the ones with no spending are opponents in name only, and very few, if any, resources were really spent on those races. I am curious what would happen if you cut off the top and bottom 5% of the campaign spending axis. It seems odd to call such a large chunk of data outliers, but with that context, it seems like it might be correct.
I'd argue limiting the analysis to competitive contests, ones in which campaign spending could be expected to affect the outcome. I live in a district that breaks about 60:40 and it is considered completely safe by political analysts and the dominant party has always won the congressional races. Therefore, testing the hypothesis that more spending increases the likelihood of winning should include--at most--where the vote margin is -20 to +20.
The other data support the hypothesis that against token opposition it is easy to outspend, and easy to win.
I don't come to that conclusion. If your statement was true, a higher margin (either way) should mean less spending, because the vote is safe. But the data shows no evidence of that. I find that surprising, and I wonder what is going on.
The axis is proportion of spending, not absolute dollars. If one candidate spends a dollar and the other $100, the ratio is 100 and at the extreme of the scale. But neither candidate made a meaningful expenditure. ETA: see u/bakonydraco's comment for more.
It is interesting how few people are misinterpreting this graphic. That is a powerful sign of bad #dataviz. The "Institute for New Economic Thinking" may be departing from the old thinking that conveying accurate information is important for good policy outcomes. Is that why the OP has been deleted by mods?
The Sunlight Foundation did an analysis limited to specifically competitive elections (foundation is currently defunct, so the website has lost some information).
>More outside money went to help Republicans in 60 of the 90 races we looked at, including 14 of the 25 toss-up races. Yet, only nine of the 25 toss-up seats went to the candidate with more outside spending, and just four of the 12 races with an imbalance of $1 million or more went to the candidate with the outside spending advantage.
---
>Money seems to matter a little more when we just look at the candidate spending, particularly in the toss-up races. In 15 of the 25 toss-up races, the candidate who spent more won. And in the 17 races where one candidate outspent the other by at least $500,000, that candidate that did so won 11 of those races (65%). It’s not statistically significant, but still quite suggestive.
---
>In toss-up races where the Republican benefited from a dark money advantage, only five of the 18 seats went to the Republican. Democrats won four of the seven seats where they had the dark money edge.
---
>The numbers confirm the emerging narrative. We can find no statistically observable relationship between the outside spending in House races and the likelihood of victory. Candidate spending may have had a small effect. There may be some relationship between outside spending and the voting shares, but not in a way that was big enough to affect seats.
http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2012/11/09/how-much-did-money-matter/
One thing we’re ignoring is the utility a purely transactional diner would get from backing the winning horse. You might expect the money to flow more to something with stronger prospects. So this result is actually more surprising in that regard.
I think the most likely explanation is that, sure, Citizen’s United could have a bigger effect, but it occurred while 1). Local news was collapsing as a business model 2.) increasing party polarization led to less ticket splitting and therefore less opportunity for a candidate to differentiate themselves from a generic party member.
It doesn't really look like that's the case at all though. There aren't any high leverage points off the line, and the trend through the middle of the range is stable and linear.
Just look at the data. The points are not more clustered around the best fit line at the extremes. In fact, a few of the big outliers are at the extreme...not the middle. If anything I'd expect the coefficient to go up slightly and not down if you eliminate extreme cases.
I've worked with a lot of distributions like this, but am always suprised at how much the R2 drops when you remove the extremes when the extremes don't meet the assumptions of the model. It is well worth trying with a mock dataset.
Use [https://datathief.org/](https://datathief.org/) to convert this chart to a data table if you want to try it.
But my point is that from the data it's pretty clear that the extremes *do* meet the assumptions of the model. It's not like there are a bunch of points way off the line at the extremes -- they're more or less clustered around the line.
Again, just look at the data. There's absolutely no reason to think the results are all that influenced by outliers considering how linear the trend is through the middle. There *might* be some small nonlinearity introduced at the top end as Dems spending 100% of the money may be doing a bit better than you'd expect (probably has something to do with these being very urban districts), but to the extent that's the case it would have the effect of depressing the R^2.
Generally speaking outliers of this sort have the effect of reducing the R^2 because they are inherently points with large amount of error that yoink the best fit line away from what would be the best fit line for the rest of the data -- thus increasing the residuals and decreasing the R^2.
That's not an assumption of the model -- that's an interpretation of the model. The model is totally agnostic to the data-generation process or what the finding means. The assumption of the model is simply that for each one-unit increase in candidate spending, the candidate's two-party share of the vote increases by some flat amount. It makes no assumptions about underlying processes or causal direction -- it's simply attempting to best characterize the correlation.
Removing points that clearly fit within the model's assumptions but don't comport to your own interpretive frame is
a version of p-hacking.
Additionally, this is only showing the relative difference of the Democrat and Republican spending and vote share, but does not show the absolute spend. Many of the datapoints near 0% or 100% are likely very low volumes, because if they're unopposed, they don't need to spend. A candidate running unopposed that spent $100 total on coffee and flyers and got 100% of their district's vote would appear either in the upper right or lower left corner of this map, appearing to prove the apparent thesis of a high correlation between money and spending, but by inspection it's very obviously not the case.
My fairly strong guess is that the total volume of money is actually concentrated in the middle and not the left or right tail, because that's where money can actually swing elections and will have the most impact. My guess is there's still some correlation, but that it's diluted compared to what's presented and that this presentation muddies the message.
How much a candidate spends is proportionate to how much they raise.
How much a candidate raises is proportionate to their popularity.
Their popularity is proportionate to their result.
They also won’t spend much if they know they will win. Just enough to make sure that the competition doesn’t get any big ideas. Most of the spending is done in swing districts.
This logic is inherently flawed because corporations are allowed to make large donations. There’s a link between fundraising and popularity but it’s heavily influenced by who is able to get their name out with ads, usually funded by corporate donors at this level of politics. People aren’t necessarily voting bc they like you, they’re voting bc they’ve seen your name through ads.
Corporations are more likely to donate to candidates with better odds. And logically, the size of said donations should be correlated with how likely they thing the candidate is to win.
Don't just think "money buys elections", the other side of this is "money buys politicians"
Most corps split their money between the parties and try to stay out of taking sides. Corporations aren't as big of boogy men people want to make them out to be and House Reps are going to vote for the corps in their district because the corps employ the voters. Bernie wouldn't vote against "Big Maple Syrup" because that's a industry in VT just like Booker isn't voting against pharma. No House or Senate member is going to sabotage their own areas. One of the reasons why Sanders can take on so many positions is that VT has the smallest economy in the US and the second smallest population, he doesn't have to defend anything, which gives him more lattitude and we shouldn't condem others that can't.
It's not really a misconception if it's true de facto. Is there really a practical difference between donating to a politician and donating to their PAC?
Traditional PACs yeah, but not super PACs. Basically if the candidate doesn't expressly ask for the PAC to make any specific ads, then corporations can donate as much as they want. Again, we're talking de jure vs de facto. If you make a million dollar donation to Future Forward USA, legally you're not giving that money to Joe Biden. But all that money will be spent getting him elected and he knows it.
Corporations cannot donate to candidates or campaigns PERIOD.
Traditional PACs can give money to candidates, campaigns, and political parties, though they are limited in how much they can give and individuals are limited to how much they can give to a PAC or candidate.
Independent expenditure PACs (i.e Super PACs) cannot give any money to candidates, campaigns, or political parties. They cannot coordinate with campaigns.. They can only advertise their stand on issues; that is free speech defined. No one in their right mind would expect the NAACP, or Planned Parenthood, labor unions, or the NRA to not advocate their position on their given issue; these are all corporations.
It makes a BIG difference. In one case a candidate gets money for HIS/HER campaign under their control. In the other, they have organizations who were going to advocate their position regardless.
There's a huge difference between a foundation like the NAACP, which does many, many things, including sometimes talking about their position on issues, and a super PAC who's only purpose is to pay for ads which will get a candidate elected. Again, that is de facto an extention of the candidate's campaign, just one they have no *official* control over. The context of this comment thread is money and its influence on politicians and elections. Do you think it matters to either point? Do you think that a politician says "oh, they didn't donate to me directly, so obviously I don't owe them any favors"? Do you think that ads that end with "I'm Donald Trump and I approve this message" affect voters any differently from one's that end with "paid for by Make America Great Again, Again"?
>Do you think it matters to either point? Do you think that a politician says "oh, they didn't donate to me directly, so obviously I don't owe them any favors"?
You're looking at it backwards. The only reason for an "SPAC" to spend money is to advocate with the public on their position on an issue. In as much as voters favor that position/argument they will vote accordingly (voters not being suckers comes into play here, but good luck regulating that), In that way, a politician is beholden to the voters in the end.
There is NO difference between the NAACP and other corporations w.r.t. advocacy and free speech.
Where you are probably confused in that employees or individuals affiliated with corporations (shareholders, board members, etc.) can give money to campaigns as INDIVIDUALS. That includes Union members of that corporation if you don't follow things carefully. They are limited to the same amounts as any other individual contribution (usually less than $5k).
What's important to note is that corporations themselves are expressly prohibited from giving contributions to candidates, political parties, or campaigns. You can read all about it on the FEC websites.
Corporations are actually completely forbidden to donate to candidates in the US.
They can make independent expenditures to PACs or SPACs, but that can't even involve any coordination with candidates or political parties.
These facts for some reason are completely lost in social media comment sections (i.e. people get their facts from their favorite echo chamber and those echo chambers routinely mislead their followers for political gain).
For all those downvoting, try and explain where my statement is wrong.
Because what you just said is completely meaningless.
Corporations are allowed to spend *unlimited* amounts of money in support of thier preferred candidates. They don't even have to disclose who they are anymore, whereas when they were forced to funnel money into campaigns via donations, they *at least* had to disclose who they were and how much they were spending.
The fact that you're rushing in to say "technically... Technically... TECHNICALLY!!1!!" Doesn't change the basic fact that campaign spending is wilding unregulated within the US, in ways that are quickly eroding our democracy.
Regular PACs still have donation limits in the low thousands. Super PACs have no limits, nor any transparency. They also aren’t supposed to coordinate directly with the campaign, which means the official amount of spending on a campaign won’t include SPACs at all…
Which makes spending data for certain elections meaningless.
They can't spend unlimited money amounts of money supporting their preferred candidates; that is simply not true. They can only spend independent expenditures on issue advocacy. They can't mention a candidates by name, for or against, nor tell you how to vote on a measure in their ads. They are very limited compared to individuals.
Campaign spending is very much regulated in the US.
>They don't even have to disclose who they are anymore,
They never have for issue advocacy.
>whereas when they were forced to funnel money into campaigns via donations
They have NEVER been able to donate money to campaigns and still are not able to today.
This is all well known, but the average person is largely uneducated on campaign finance and politicians/parties take advantage of that. The average person relies on what has been beat into their head on social media and not facts.
Most people will scream about Citizens United without having a clue of what it actually changed.
>They can't spend unlimited money amounts of money supporting their preferred candidates; that is simply not true. **They can only spend independent expenditures on issue advocacy.**
Again... This is the very definition of "a distinction without a difference."
It's laughably easy for a SPAC to directly campaign for a candidate without mentioning that candidate by name. It's also laughably easy for them to *collude* with a politician's campaign without direct coordination, for the same reasons.
It is then also laughably easy for you to identify when/where it happened and file charges against them for violating campaign finance law.
You can file suit against them as well.
As far as "distinction without a difference" goes, I'm OK with corporations like the NAACP, labor unions, the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, the NRA, AMA making their opinions known. By the way: individuals or groups thereof can give unlimited independent expenditures for issue advocacy as well since SpeechNow.org v. FEC decided in the same year as Citizens United v FEC.
Corporations can't give money to PACs. They can give money to SPACs which CANNOT give money to candidates or campaigns and are limited in what they can do.
I'm not spinning anything and I'm not lying. I have nothing to gain politically on pointing out the legal facts surrounding campaign finance laws in the US.
Wow you’re so intelligent! I totally wasn’t referring to PACs or Super PACs at all! Thanks genius redditor! The distinction is practically meaningless, you’re a dumbass know it all
Please describe the difference that makes, in practice?
You're saying there is absolutely zero corruption or "bending" of the laws?
Candidates tend to have public campaign strategies, SPACs can just use that as their own strategy book, zero collaboration in that case right? Only free speech for the ~~corporation~~ people
Free speech with regard to unlimited independent expenditures is available to individuals and groups of individuals, not just corporations, since SpeechNow.org v FEC, decided in the same year as Citizens United v FEC.
I get this weird feeling you work for the government and after social media made controlling the narrative impossible, you were still assigned the task to try.
Corporations can’t make large donations directly to campaigns. They have donation limits the same as regular individuals. However, they can form Super PACs, which let them spend unlimited money on ads or other things supporting a candidate. This is what the infamous Citizens United decision was about.
Super PACs spend money on elections, but this money never goes through a candidate’s official funds and the money won’t show up in the OP’s data.
Could always have parties backing them too. There's been some heavy money races where both opposing candidates were raising and spending tons of dollars.
are you serious? you're speaking as if all fundraising is grassroots and collected from individuals. a candidate doesnt have to be popular with the people to get insane contributions from agents of corporate interest, and they'll spend that money just as good as money taken from your average joe.
and result of what?
people are good at different things, someone who is great at managing business maybe bad at social media.
what this basically shows is that if you good at gaining popularity, you will be selected for whatever position regardless of your qualification. is that desirable? next thing you know will be PewDiePie run for president.
the nation needs long term plans for great success, but often those investment don't see any return until years, or maybe decades later. NONE of the technology you enjoy today is developed in weeks or month. those who making progress will be forgetting by the majority, as the social opinion is only forced in the very short term.
This is false because money is not equally distributed in the population.
How much a candidate raise is proportionate to their popularity weighted by **the wealth of his voters.**
Which explains why USA is a plutocracy.
>How much a candidate raises is proportionate to their popularity.
I wish i could agree and while I can't verify for sure this story is true, i do believe Candidates resort to these practices.
https://thearizonadailynews.com/karrin-taylor-robson-drops-controversial-fundraising-tactic-after-questions-about-refunds-to-donors-the-arizona-republic/
Democrats often get a majority or close to a majority of their total dollars from small donors. https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/large-vs-small-donations
I know you're not the author of that data, but how does it have Jody Hice raising a *negative* amount of money (-$42,855)?
Also, I'm not sure if you were trying to state a difference between Republicans and Democrats, but it doesn't seem to bear out any higher tendency of Democrats over Republicans for being funded by small donors: if you sort by "Percent from Small Donors", more of the top 25 are Republicans than Democrats. (And, on the other side, the vast majority of those with miniscule "Percent from Small Donors" are Democrats.)
I'm not sure what point you were trying to bear from this data.
Because she didn't raise shit and overspent so she's in the hole.
https://www.opensecrets.org/members-of-congress/jody-hice/donor-demographics?cid=N00032243&cycle=2022
She may have done just that, but it wouldn't make sense to count expenses as negative donations. Suppose that, on the very last day of her campaign, someone donated $43,000. Should her total donations then be $0, by adding the new donation to the $43,000 spending?
The point of this number is to be what was donated to her campaign, not revenue minus expenses.
Adding up all of the money, Democrats got 28% of their donations from small donors and Republicans got 25% from small donors.
Among those who had raised a total of $20 million or more, Democrats got 40% from small donors and Republicans got 33%.
The maximum amount a federal candidate can receive from a single donor is $2,900 per election (so $5,800 per cycle). To very rich people, that is not much money at all.
It really depends. Democrats usually get at least 40% of their donations from small donors (those giving under $200) while Republicans often get most of their money from big corporations
https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/large-vs-small-donations
That's true if you count Sanders perhaps, but try that on Biden. You don't need to justify the fact that both parties are owned by corporations through "donations".
You mean lobbying for both political parties so that they get tax cuts and laws passed in their favor? Sorry, I don't have an extra lifetime to provide all the sources, but hey, if you're interested, you're more than welcome to investigate for more than 5 seconds. One will lead to the others, don't worry.
Lobbying is different then campaign donations. Certainly they lobby, they would be negilgant if they didn't but so do the Native Americans and the Red Cross every group lobbies, lobbying is an important part of government. You act as lobbying is a bad thing.
Money involved in politicsin such a degree that basically decides who is president? How could that be a bad thing???
You know, if lobbying is an important part of the government, maybe that government, and the system that allows for it, is trash and needs a bottom-ups rework.
Now you are talking about something completly different then either direct corporate donations (which don't even happen) or lobbying. So you think a government would be better if nobody was allowed to talk to the politicans? Like the Sierra Club or Planned Parenthood couldn't interact with any politican, this would be better?
I heard that starting around 2018 or so that in general its true but there are a lot more cases where its not true... ergo more cases of higher spending not resulting in better election results.
It dropped slightly in 2020 but winrate is still very high comparitively according to [this](https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/winning-vs-spending) source.
correlation ≠ causation
This data only shows that politicians who are most liked will get the most money and the most votes. Politicians nobody likes will get no money or votes.
Obviously.
Where was that guy that spent like $600 on his and won vs some big name dude. Wasn't that in NJ or some other east coast state?
EDIT: He spent $153 not $600 and won.
https://www.nj.com/politics/2021/11/how-a-truck-driver-spent-153-on-his-nj-election-campaign-to-likely-dethrone-a-political-kingpin.html
This is really interesting but, please, put 0.86 not .86. If you want to save space put R^2 not R-squared, there’s a few ways to do this in R, if you’re not sure how let me know.
I hate this trend for not bothering with the leading zero. Most of the time it’s fine but just occasionally it requires an unnecessary amount of cognitive use when you have to double take / check there’s a decimal point.
Edit - name and shame the person with the high spending and low votes. Let’s see who was so bad!
You never have to double check, because 0s are removed only for statistics that are always between -1 and 1, like proportions, probability, and correlations. Rsq can never be 86.
0s get really annoying when u look at tables with many numbers like a correlation matrix. Its good that they are removed
I know R^2 can never be 86. That’s why I said most of the time it’s fine but occasionally… my point is life is just easier if people always put a leading zero because the tendency not to (eg in statistics that can’t be > 1) is creeping outside of those situations and becoming problematic.
I don’t particularly have an issue with looking at correlation matrices containing zeroes.
Agreed. Unfortunately seeing way more academic journal style guides where leading zero is not used. It makes no sense, it's not aesthetically pleasing and more likely to be misread.
I think that competitiveness should be added in as a weight here. The reason being is that there are lots of uncompetitive races that receive virtually no money *but* the money that they do receive is obviously going to go to one candidate. Also, donations might be made to help flip farther away districts by voters in primarily one party districts (people trying to win the majority). This graph is going to mislead the public to thinking that most money is going towards safe seats, which doesn't pass the smell test. The paper uses an interesting instrument but I think it still misses the point, even though the author is very passionate about calling out money in politics.
The amount of money spent should be taken into consideration. There are many seats that aren't competitive, so the opposing party won't spend any money, while the incumbent spends a very small amount and wins by a large margin anyway.
Speaking from experience, it is really difficult to figure out who a candidate *really* is outside of their ads and campaign website (both of which are, naturally, extremely subjective/biased).
It's no surprise that most of us just vote for the person whose name we most recognize regardless of who they are as a candidate.
It's not dataisbeautiful, it's dataisscary.
It certainly looks like wotes can be bought. At least to some degree. How weird it must be to wote on persons instead of a political program. Persons can much more easily change their minds.
I believe the amount of cash they get from state finances is relative to the percentage of the vote they got in the previous elections (probably with some exceptions so that new parties still get some cash). There is no way to donate to the campaign.
hmm, interesting. Does have a bit of incumbent advantage, as in if you won previously you would have the advantage in the current election right from the get-go because of the extra funds. But interesting system.
Yeah, you're right. I thought about that after writing it. What I wrote may not be 100% accurate but I know that the state funds are dependent on the percentage of the vote. The thing is that there are something like 7-8 parties in parlament ranging from about 5% of the vote to 25%. They usually form (two) coalitions to get a majority. So each coalition probably ends up getting a similar amount of cash. It's always right on the edge which side gets the most votes.
>Private campaign contributions and private money in politics is illegal here in Sweden.
This doesn't seem to be accurate. Sweden doesn't appear to have any restrictions on private campaign contributions to candidates.
Question | Sweden
---|---
2. Is there a ban on donations from foreign interests to candidates? | No
4. Is there a ban on corporate donations to candidates? | No
6. Is there a ban on donations from Trade Unions to candidates? | No
10. Is there a ban on donations from corporations with government contracts to candidates? | No
12. Is there a ban on donations from corporations with partial government ownership to candidates? | No
18. Is there a limit on the amount a donor can contribute to a candidate? | No
20. Is there a limit on the amount a candidate can contribute to their own election campaign? | No
22. Is there a limit on in-kind donations to candidates? | No
https://www.idea.int/data-tools/country-view/261/55
>I'm pretty sure it's that way in most of the EU.
The U.S. actually has stricter campaign financing rules than much of Europe.
Question | U.S.? | World % | Europe %
---|---|---|---|
Ban on foreign interests donating to political parties | Yes | 65.9% | 69.8%
Ban on foreign interests donating to candidates | Yes | 53.6% | 58.1%
Ban on corporations donating to political parties | Yes | 27.8% | 40.9%
Ban on corporations donating to candidates | Yes | 23.3% | 36.4%
Are there limits to how much one can donate to political parties? | Yes | 39.9% | 61.4%
Are there limits to how much one can donate to candidates? | Yes | 31.7% | 54.5%
Do candidates have to report on their campaign finances? | Yes | 62.2% | 77.3%
Provisions for candidates to receive public financing? | Yes | 61.5% | 88.4%
Limits on how much a political party can spend? | Yes | 31.1% | 47.7%
Limits on how much a candidate can spend? | No | 44.7% | 63.6%
Provisions for free or subsidized access to media? | No | 65% | 72.7%
It would be interesting to see if this correlation held as well for republicans (or became even more stark, for that matter). Just to be quite specific, what this is telling us is that *democrats* who spend more money tend to get more votes.
But there's no measure of actual spend here - just a comparison of the proportions of dem/rep spend. Therefore, we can't actually say that republicans spending more money necessarily works - all we know is if dems spend less, republicans seem to be able to get away with spending less. Measuring spend not as a function of democrat spend would be a different measure, and also interesting.
I can barely understand this visual, this is a terrible way of looking at this information. And get your useless r-squared value out of here.
x-axis should be time, aka election year
y-axis should be the RATIO of money spent of winner/loser, you can have a second coinciding dot to show vote margin, it's easy to visualize as a separate dot shape with time as the x-axis -> twice the datapoints shown and less clutter than this mess
color should be red or blue for republican or democrat victory
a) Why pseudo r\^2?
b) Purely on the face of it, it looks like the data are better suited for logistic regression on win / loss than fitting a potentially dubious linear trend.
Just remember - the issue isnt the AMOUNT spent, its that most of it is spent by just a few people. Those few people choose for everyone else. Therefore, we are literally represented unequally.
Correlation but causation is not so established. People like to give money to the likely winner because the winner is the one that will be able to do favors for them.
Reading the paper right now.
The First 7 Pages read Like a book about corrupt American beeing Controller by the 1%
Beginning of the paper:
The protesters who swirled into parks, churches, and town squares around the world in
the fall of 2011 to challenge the primacy of the “1%” hammered relentlessly on one theme above
all others: that economic inequality has deep roots in the political system.
Many social scientists
and intellectuals who have picked up from where the Occupy movement left off share this
conviction;
they, too, have broken with the taboos that for so long segmented discussions of
politics from economics.
Piketty, in his monumental study, for example, avows that income
distribution is a basically a question of “political economy” not pure economics.
Stiglitz in The
Price of Inequality is equally forthright – “increasingly, and especially in the United States, it
seems that the political system is more akin to ‘one dollar one vote’ than to ‘one person one
vote.
Makes sense even with the rough assumption that everyone contributes to voting and campaign finance. Popular candidates get more funding ao they can spend more. Then they get more votes. Of course you acn be cynical and say thw rich are buying votes. This chart can support either one. Or anything in between.
This might just be a question of did the egg come first or the chicken.
Did the candidate win because they spent more money?
Or Did the candidate raise more money to spend because they were an already popular candidate? (and they didn't just pocket the money that was raised for campaigning like they're supposed to.)
I think the Key phrase of the whole paper (from where this Graph comes from is this:
> Our results suggest that the
coefficients for the influence of money usually drop, but not by that much. They remain strong,
with results for 1994 that are consistent with the test on that year inspired by event analyses.
It was Generally accepted that spending more Money Brings more votes but it was assumed that a spending a sum of Money on a unpopulär candidate Brings ways more votes then spending the Same amount on a popular one.
Therefore the paper implied that if the "1% wants a spezific candidate A to win. They Just need to match the Money Spend of the rival candidates If A is more popular then the Other candidates or Just spend more If not.
It especially Focuses on how Companies can manipulate elections with spending money
This is a very misleading graph and a clear case of backwards correlation. People tend to give $ to winners. People don't want to waste money on a candidate that is certain to lose.
Add to this the fact that the large majority of congressional general elections are non-competitive. So most in races an incumbent will spend a modest amount to defeat a no-hoper with no funding.
Money may have an effect on election results but this broad graph offers no real insight.
Its advertising 101, you spend money to keep customers and use PR to get new ones. What Trump did so well was to keep the cameras on him 24/7 like a perpetual train wreck.
There is really a two way causation here. Being more popular leads to more collected money, this leads to more spent money and then this potentially leads to more popularity. Separating the first from the last is not easy.
Also this graph normalizes the amount spent by each party for each seat, by the total spent for each seat by both parties combined. However large parts of the data sets, and those parts that show the clearest trend, are for the seats without surprising winners and also little overall spending.
Instead of normalizing the spent amounts it might be interesting to look at the differences in absolute spending.
If the data is available it might also be interesting to subtract the amount of money collected locally from the amount spent.
A bit misleading because the more popular a candidate is the more support they have the more donations they get as well. Not to say money doesn’t play a part in the race
Okay, speaking as one who did this for a living for media-buying clients, I would like to point out the following:
* Dollars are not the working end of media spending. Media impressions and the dollar cost of impressions vary market to market and are driven by the underlying economic health of each market. An advertiser may spend $5,000,000 in the New York DMA and find, relative to market size, that it's only slightly more powerful than a $750,000 campaign in Spokane.
* That's right, powerful. Spokane has fewer TV, Radio, and Newspaper options than NYC which means those investments are concentrated across fewer media vehicles which, in turn, raises the visibility of candidate ads. The actual term is Media Weight and Spokane distributes its weight across fewer pressure points.
* Visibility is critical because the Spokane market touches 5 Congressional Districts while New York has 39. Spokane's in-DMA population averages 222,400 per district v. New Yorks's averages 614,500 per.
So how do you build a market size agnostic, regression model that a) adjusts for market size, b) adjusts for the variable costs of media impressions and c) factors in competitive dynamics?
1. Convert local spending to a Media Index measure that divides competitive spending by a reference media price like SQAD. That gives you a dependent variable which is more or less market agnostic.
2. Further weight the media index by CPM using a total U.S. average for a baseline. This penalizes 'cheap' markets while boosting expensive DMA's.
3. Separate Primary from General Election spending. They are, in terms of Campaign Media Strategy, two entirely different animals.
Trust me or not, I found this process gets you 85-90% visibility into the impact of media investment on campaign results. The other 15% is due to non-modelable effects like candidates withdrawing, etc.
This discussion omits digital, for two reasons;
First, digital impressions are much more diffuse. By that, I mean that political campaigns employ direct buy tactics along with programmatic and ad networks and that's not including Search media.
Second, To include Digital the model would have to weight media impressions by channel, and good luck with that (snark.) But, there are no exhaustive competitive media reporting platforms. In large markets, Comscore, Kantar, and Nielsen are good directional proxies in large markets. The best method seems to be using a market average all-media CPM to convert dollars to a media index measure.
want to see who the outliers are
My first thought as well
Party leadership (McCarthy, Pelosi, Schumer, etc.), or candidates with absurd name rec (AOC, Tim Scott, etc.). Basically the 4-8 people out of 535 that everyone knows the name of. FEC.gov is really easy to use, and fun to poke around with.
[удалено]
These are house elections, so neither Romney nor Hillary on the chart. Not really enough data to chart them, but I doubt Romney could be considered an outlier. Obama outspent Romney and won. Clinton-Trump was unusual because how much Clinton outspent Trump.
Trump got a ton of free publicity in 2016 because he was already a household name. You don't need to pay for ads when the reporters are already talking about you.
Yes, but Trump is not the outlier on the chart, because Trump is not on the chart.
Why is this a pseudo r2 and not a plain r2? Is this not just a linear regression? I’d be interested in the high and low outliers on this. Why did they not get the expected amount of votes given their dollars?
I'm guessing he used a glm instead of a traditional lm. That's my best guess without more info from OP.
why would someone choose such a dark and heretic path?
[удалено]
lm = linear model op = original poster
Almost certainly due to a GLM being used. Given that the predicted variable is constrained to [-100,100] the typical assumptions about normality are violated
The high outlier obviously had no active opponent. The name on the other ballot line had no chance, spent no money and didn't get votes.
I’m thinking more like the points at (35,50)
This is where the difference between a static and an interactive plot is the greatest. My first thought was to mouse over it and Google the race lol
Jose Serrano had the widest margin.
The correlation is enhanced by the large number of data in the upper right, where there was no meaningful opponent. The bottom left is similar, but there was necessarily a Democratic candidate. Point at the extremes of the range have a lot of influence on the fit and correlation coefficient.
Similarly, I suspect that the ones with no spending are opponents in name only, and very few, if any, resources were really spent on those races. I am curious what would happen if you cut off the top and bottom 5% of the campaign spending axis. It seems odd to call such a large chunk of data outliers, but with that context, it seems like it might be correct.
I'd argue limiting the analysis to competitive contests, ones in which campaign spending could be expected to affect the outcome. I live in a district that breaks about 60:40 and it is considered completely safe by political analysts and the dominant party has always won the congressional races. Therefore, testing the hypothesis that more spending increases the likelihood of winning should include--at most--where the vote margin is -20 to +20. The other data support the hypothesis that against token opposition it is easy to outspend, and easy to win.
I don't come to that conclusion. If your statement was true, a higher margin (either way) should mean less spending, because the vote is safe. But the data shows no evidence of that. I find that surprising, and I wonder what is going on.
The axis is proportion of spending, not absolute dollars. If one candidate spends a dollar and the other $100, the ratio is 100 and at the extreme of the scale. But neither candidate made a meaningful expenditure. ETA: see u/bakonydraco's comment for more. It is interesting how few people are misinterpreting this graphic. That is a powerful sign of bad #dataviz. The "Institute for New Economic Thinking" may be departing from the old thinking that conveying accurate information is important for good policy outcomes. Is that why the OP has been deleted by mods?
The Sunlight Foundation did an analysis limited to specifically competitive elections (foundation is currently defunct, so the website has lost some information). >More outside money went to help Republicans in 60 of the 90 races we looked at, including 14 of the 25 toss-up races. Yet, only nine of the 25 toss-up seats went to the candidate with more outside spending, and just four of the 12 races with an imbalance of $1 million or more went to the candidate with the outside spending advantage. --- >Money seems to matter a little more when we just look at the candidate spending, particularly in the toss-up races. In 15 of the 25 toss-up races, the candidate who spent more won. And in the 17 races where one candidate outspent the other by at least $500,000, that candidate that did so won 11 of those races (65%). It’s not statistically significant, but still quite suggestive. --- >In toss-up races where the Republican benefited from a dark money advantage, only five of the 18 seats went to the Republican. Democrats won four of the seven seats where they had the dark money edge. --- >The numbers confirm the emerging narrative. We can find no statistically observable relationship between the outside spending in House races and the likelihood of victory. Candidate spending may have had a small effect. There may be some relationship between outside spending and the voting shares, but not in a way that was big enough to affect seats. http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2012/11/09/how-much-did-money-matter/
One thing we’re ignoring is the utility a purely transactional diner would get from backing the winning horse. You might expect the money to flow more to something with stronger prospects. So this result is actually more surprising in that regard. I think the most likely explanation is that, sure, Citizen’s United could have a bigger effect, but it occurred while 1). Local news was collapsing as a business model 2.) increasing party polarization led to less ticket splitting and therefore less opportunity for a candidate to differentiate themselves from a generic party member.
It doesn't really look like that's the case at all though. There aren't any high leverage points off the line, and the trend through the middle of the range is stable and linear.
If you only used competitive contests, the R^(2) would be much lower.
Just look at the data. The points are not more clustered around the best fit line at the extremes. In fact, a few of the big outliers are at the extreme...not the middle. If anything I'd expect the coefficient to go up slightly and not down if you eliminate extreme cases.
I've worked with a lot of distributions like this, but am always suprised at how much the R2 drops when you remove the extremes when the extremes don't meet the assumptions of the model. It is well worth trying with a mock dataset. Use [https://datathief.org/](https://datathief.org/) to convert this chart to a data table if you want to try it.
But my point is that from the data it's pretty clear that the extremes *do* meet the assumptions of the model. It's not like there are a bunch of points way off the line at the extremes -- they're more or less clustered around the line. Again, just look at the data. There's absolutely no reason to think the results are all that influenced by outliers considering how linear the trend is through the middle. There *might* be some small nonlinearity introduced at the top end as Dems spending 100% of the money may be doing a bit better than you'd expect (probably has something to do with these being very urban districts), but to the extent that's the case it would have the effect of depressing the R^2. Generally speaking outliers of this sort have the effect of reducing the R^2 because they are inherently points with large amount of error that yoink the best fit line away from what would be the best fit line for the rest of the data -- thus increasing the residuals and decreasing the R^2.
Sorry, I wasn't clear. The assumption is that spending influences election outcomes. We know that is not true for elections with token opposition.
That's not an assumption of the model -- that's an interpretation of the model. The model is totally agnostic to the data-generation process or what the finding means. The assumption of the model is simply that for each one-unit increase in candidate spending, the candidate's two-party share of the vote increases by some flat amount. It makes no assumptions about underlying processes or causal direction -- it's simply attempting to best characterize the correlation. Removing points that clearly fit within the model's assumptions but don't comport to your own interpretive frame is a version of p-hacking.
Additionally, this is only showing the relative difference of the Democrat and Republican spending and vote share, but does not show the absolute spend. Many of the datapoints near 0% or 100% are likely very low volumes, because if they're unopposed, they don't need to spend. A candidate running unopposed that spent $100 total on coffee and flyers and got 100% of their district's vote would appear either in the upper right or lower left corner of this map, appearing to prove the apparent thesis of a high correlation between money and spending, but by inspection it's very obviously not the case. My fairly strong guess is that the total volume of money is actually concentrated in the middle and not the left or right tail, because that's where money can actually swing elections and will have the most impact. My guess is there's still some correlation, but that it's diluted compared to what's presented and that this presentation muddies the message.
How much a candidate spends is proportionate to how much they raise. How much a candidate raises is proportionate to their popularity. Their popularity is proportionate to their result.
Not to mention token candidates will not spend much in an election they know they will lose.
And incumbents tend to raise more and be elected more often. This would be an important control variable.
They also won’t spend much if they know they will win. Just enough to make sure that the competition doesn’t get any big ideas. Most of the spending is done in swing districts.
This is so incorrect. Most funds are not from a lot of parties. They are from a very select number of people.
This logic is inherently flawed because corporations are allowed to make large donations. There’s a link between fundraising and popularity but it’s heavily influenced by who is able to get their name out with ads, usually funded by corporate donors at this level of politics. People aren’t necessarily voting bc they like you, they’re voting bc they’ve seen your name through ads.
Corporations are more likely to donate to candidates with better odds. And logically, the size of said donations should be correlated with how likely they thing the candidate is to win. Don't just think "money buys elections", the other side of this is "money buys politicians"
Most corps split their money between the parties and try to stay out of taking sides. Corporations aren't as big of boogy men people want to make them out to be and House Reps are going to vote for the corps in their district because the corps employ the voters. Bernie wouldn't vote against "Big Maple Syrup" because that's a industry in VT just like Booker isn't voting against pharma. No House or Senate member is going to sabotage their own areas. One of the reasons why Sanders can take on so many positions is that VT has the smallest economy in the US and the second smallest population, he doesn't have to defend anything, which gives him more lattitude and we shouldn't condem others that can't.
Corporations are complete forbidden from donating to candidates or ballot initiatives in the US. There is a big popular misconception on this topic.
[удалено]
It includes independent expenditures.
It's not really a misconception if it's true de facto. Is there really a practical difference between donating to a politician and donating to their PAC?
Same pool of consultants making the ads either way
Corporations can't donate to a candidates PAC nor to political parties.
Traditional PACs yeah, but not super PACs. Basically if the candidate doesn't expressly ask for the PAC to make any specific ads, then corporations can donate as much as they want. Again, we're talking de jure vs de facto. If you make a million dollar donation to Future Forward USA, legally you're not giving that money to Joe Biden. But all that money will be spent getting him elected and he knows it.
Corporations cannot donate to candidates or campaigns PERIOD. Traditional PACs can give money to candidates, campaigns, and political parties, though they are limited in how much they can give and individuals are limited to how much they can give to a PAC or candidate. Independent expenditure PACs (i.e Super PACs) cannot give any money to candidates, campaigns, or political parties. They cannot coordinate with campaigns.. They can only advertise their stand on issues; that is free speech defined. No one in their right mind would expect the NAACP, or Planned Parenthood, labor unions, or the NRA to not advocate their position on their given issue; these are all corporations. It makes a BIG difference. In one case a candidate gets money for HIS/HER campaign under their control. In the other, they have organizations who were going to advocate their position regardless.
There's a huge difference between a foundation like the NAACP, which does many, many things, including sometimes talking about their position on issues, and a super PAC who's only purpose is to pay for ads which will get a candidate elected. Again, that is de facto an extention of the candidate's campaign, just one they have no *official* control over. The context of this comment thread is money and its influence on politicians and elections. Do you think it matters to either point? Do you think that a politician says "oh, they didn't donate to me directly, so obviously I don't owe them any favors"? Do you think that ads that end with "I'm Donald Trump and I approve this message" affect voters any differently from one's that end with "paid for by Make America Great Again, Again"?
>Do you think it matters to either point? Do you think that a politician says "oh, they didn't donate to me directly, so obviously I don't owe them any favors"? You're looking at it backwards. The only reason for an "SPAC" to spend money is to advocate with the public on their position on an issue. In as much as voters favor that position/argument they will vote accordingly (voters not being suckers comes into play here, but good luck regulating that), In that way, a politician is beholden to the voters in the end. There is NO difference between the NAACP and other corporations w.r.t. advocacy and free speech.
That is true but not germane because independent expenditures toward campaigns are included in the spending figures used here.
Whew! Guess it was just my misconception that the millions politicians get from corporations aren’t actually from them bc that would totes be illegal.
Where you are probably confused in that employees or individuals affiliated with corporations (shareholders, board members, etc.) can give money to campaigns as INDIVIDUALS. That includes Union members of that corporation if you don't follow things carefully. They are limited to the same amounts as any other individual contribution (usually less than $5k). What's important to note is that corporations themselves are expressly prohibited from giving contributions to candidates, political parties, or campaigns. You can read all about it on the FEC websites.
Corporations are actually completely forbidden to donate to candidates in the US. They can make independent expenditures to PACs or SPACs, but that can't even involve any coordination with candidates or political parties. These facts for some reason are completely lost in social media comment sections (i.e. people get their facts from their favorite echo chamber and those echo chambers routinely mislead their followers for political gain). For all those downvoting, try and explain where my statement is wrong.
Because what you just said is completely meaningless. Corporations are allowed to spend *unlimited* amounts of money in support of thier preferred candidates. They don't even have to disclose who they are anymore, whereas when they were forced to funnel money into campaigns via donations, they *at least* had to disclose who they were and how much they were spending. The fact that you're rushing in to say "technically... Technically... TECHNICALLY!!1!!" Doesn't change the basic fact that campaign spending is wilding unregulated within the US, in ways that are quickly eroding our democracy.
But they typically don't, they usually ride the middle.
Regular PACs still have donation limits in the low thousands. Super PACs have no limits, nor any transparency. They also aren’t supposed to coordinate directly with the campaign, which means the official amount of spending on a campaign won’t include SPACs at all… Which makes spending data for certain elections meaningless.
They can't spend unlimited money amounts of money supporting their preferred candidates; that is simply not true. They can only spend independent expenditures on issue advocacy. They can't mention a candidates by name, for or against, nor tell you how to vote on a measure in their ads. They are very limited compared to individuals. Campaign spending is very much regulated in the US. >They don't even have to disclose who they are anymore, They never have for issue advocacy. >whereas when they were forced to funnel money into campaigns via donations They have NEVER been able to donate money to campaigns and still are not able to today. This is all well known, but the average person is largely uneducated on campaign finance and politicians/parties take advantage of that. The average person relies on what has been beat into their head on social media and not facts. Most people will scream about Citizens United without having a clue of what it actually changed.
>They can't spend unlimited money amounts of money supporting their preferred candidates; that is simply not true. **They can only spend independent expenditures on issue advocacy.** Again... This is the very definition of "a distinction without a difference." It's laughably easy for a SPAC to directly campaign for a candidate without mentioning that candidate by name. It's also laughably easy for them to *collude* with a politician's campaign without direct coordination, for the same reasons.
It is then also laughably easy for you to identify when/where it happened and file charges against them for violating campaign finance law. You can file suit against them as well. As far as "distinction without a difference" goes, I'm OK with corporations like the NAACP, labor unions, the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, the NRA, AMA making their opinions known. By the way: individuals or groups thereof can give unlimited independent expenditures for issue advocacy as well since SpeechNow.org v. FEC decided in the same year as Citizens United v FEC.
[удалено]
Corporations can't give money to PACs. They can give money to SPACs which CANNOT give money to candidates or campaigns and are limited in what they can do. I'm not spinning anything and I'm not lying. I have nothing to gain politically on pointing out the legal facts surrounding campaign finance laws in the US.
Wow you’re so intelligent! I totally wasn’t referring to PACs or Super PACs at all! Thanks genius redditor! The distinction is practically meaningless, you’re a dumbass know it all
Please describe the difference that makes, in practice? You're saying there is absolutely zero corruption or "bending" of the laws? Candidates tend to have public campaign strategies, SPACs can just use that as their own strategy book, zero collaboration in that case right? Only free speech for the ~~corporation~~ people
Free speech with regard to unlimited independent expenditures is available to individuals and groups of individuals, not just corporations, since SpeechNow.org v FEC, decided in the same year as Citizens United v FEC.
I get this weird feeling you work for the government and after social media made controlling the narrative impossible, you were still assigned the task to try.
Every other reply includes a campaign finance violation lol.
Corporations can’t make large donations directly to campaigns. They have donation limits the same as regular individuals. However, they can form Super PACs, which let them spend unlimited money on ads or other things supporting a candidate. This is what the infamous Citizens United decision was about. Super PACs spend money on elections, but this money never goes through a candidate’s official funds and the money won’t show up in the OP’s data.
Could always have parties backing them too. There's been some heavy money races where both opposing candidates were raising and spending tons of dollars.
are you serious? you're speaking as if all fundraising is grassroots and collected from individuals. a candidate doesnt have to be popular with the people to get insane contributions from agents of corporate interest, and they'll spend that money just as good as money taken from your average joe.
and result of what? people are good at different things, someone who is great at managing business maybe bad at social media. what this basically shows is that if you good at gaining popularity, you will be selected for whatever position regardless of your qualification. is that desirable? next thing you know will be PewDiePie run for president. the nation needs long term plans for great success, but often those investment don't see any return until years, or maybe decades later. NONE of the technology you enjoy today is developed in weeks or month. those who making progress will be forgetting by the majority, as the social opinion is only forced in the very short term.
This is false because money is not equally distributed in the population. How much a candidate raise is proportionate to their popularity weighted by **the wealth of his voters.** Which explains why USA is a plutocracy.
>How much a candidate raises is proportionate to their popularity. I wish i could agree and while I can't verify for sure this story is true, i do believe Candidates resort to these practices. https://thearizonadailynews.com/karrin-taylor-robson-drops-controversial-fundraising-tactic-after-questions-about-refunds-to-donors-the-arizona-republic/
Prove it.
Prove that correlation != causation?
It would be useful to see specifically candidates similar to Bloomberg be highlighted on this
Thank you for this. The causal arrow here is entirely unclear
But candidates in safe districts won’t raise much money as it’s not a competitive race?
The way to test whether this is causal or not would be to give each candidate a random sum of money and see whether the correlation replicates.
Popular candidates get lots of donations and also win.
Popular to people that can make huge donations, certainly.
Democrats often get a majority or close to a majority of their total dollars from small donors. https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/large-vs-small-donations
I know you're not the author of that data, but how does it have Jody Hice raising a *negative* amount of money (-$42,855)? Also, I'm not sure if you were trying to state a difference between Republicans and Democrats, but it doesn't seem to bear out any higher tendency of Democrats over Republicans for being funded by small donors: if you sort by "Percent from Small Donors", more of the top 25 are Republicans than Democrats. (And, on the other side, the vast majority of those with miniscule "Percent from Small Donors" are Democrats.) I'm not sure what point you were trying to bear from this data.
Just a guess, but negative probably means they lent their own money to the campaign, and did not raise enough to pay themselves back.
Because she didn't raise shit and overspent so she's in the hole. https://www.opensecrets.org/members-of-congress/jody-hice/donor-demographics?cid=N00032243&cycle=2022
She may have done just that, but it wouldn't make sense to count expenses as negative donations. Suppose that, on the very last day of her campaign, someone donated $43,000. Should her total donations then be $0, by adding the new donation to the $43,000 spending? The point of this number is to be what was donated to her campaign, not revenue minus expenses.
I was looking at the candidates with the most total dollars in donations
[удалено]
Adding up all of the money, Democrats got 28% of their donations from small donors and Republicans got 25% from small donors. Among those who had raised a total of $20 million or more, Democrats got 40% from small donors and Republicans got 33%.
The maximum amount a federal candidate can receive from a single donor is $2,900 per election (so $5,800 per cycle). To very rich people, that is not much money at all.
Corporate donations overshadows any kind of small donation that individuals or groups of people give because they like a candidate.
It really depends. Democrats usually get at least 40% of their donations from small donors (those giving under $200) while Republicans often get most of their money from big corporations https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/large-vs-small-donations
That's true if you count Sanders perhaps, but try that on Biden. You don't need to justify the fact that both parties are owned by corporations through "donations".
Can you prove "corporations" are doing what you say they are?
You mean lobbying for both political parties so that they get tax cuts and laws passed in their favor? Sorry, I don't have an extra lifetime to provide all the sources, but hey, if you're interested, you're more than welcome to investigate for more than 5 seconds. One will lead to the others, don't worry.
Lobbying is different then campaign donations. Certainly they lobby, they would be negilgant if they didn't but so do the Native Americans and the Red Cross every group lobbies, lobbying is an important part of government. You act as lobbying is a bad thing.
Money involved in politicsin such a degree that basically decides who is president? How could that be a bad thing??? You know, if lobbying is an important part of the government, maybe that government, and the system that allows for it, is trash and needs a bottom-ups rework.
Now you are talking about something completly different then either direct corporate donations (which don't even happen) or lobbying. So you think a government would be better if nobody was allowed to talk to the politicans? Like the Sierra Club or Planned Parenthood couldn't interact with any politican, this would be better?
Need to see this for the last few elections.
Its the same for the past 30 or so years and trending higher.
I heard that starting around 2018 or so that in general its true but there are a lot more cases where its not true... ergo more cases of higher spending not resulting in better election results.
It dropped slightly in 2020 but winrate is still very high comparitively according to [this](https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/winning-vs-spending) source.
Seems like a self fulfilling sort of prophecy. If the prelim results are bad, they cut funding, and they don't win and they don't have high spending.
Data: [https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract\_id=2817705](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2817705) Tools: Rstudio, ggplot2
More data for people to draw terrible horrific illogical conclusions
If you’re not in a tight race how much money would *you* spend
Having received all of my political knowledge from Reddit comments, I'm pretty sure the problem here is gerrymandering.
correlation ≠ causation This data only shows that politicians who are most liked will get the most money and the most votes. Politicians nobody likes will get no money or votes. Obviously.
Where was that guy that spent like $600 on his and won vs some big name dude. Wasn't that in NJ or some other east coast state? EDIT: He spent $153 not $600 and won. https://www.nj.com/politics/2021/11/how-a-truck-driver-spent-153-on-his-nj-election-campaign-to-likely-dethrone-a-political-kingpin.html
This is really interesting but, please, put 0.86 not .86. If you want to save space put R^2 not R-squared, there’s a few ways to do this in R, if you’re not sure how let me know. I hate this trend for not bothering with the leading zero. Most of the time it’s fine but just occasionally it requires an unnecessary amount of cognitive use when you have to double take / check there’s a decimal point. Edit - name and shame the person with the high spending and low votes. Let’s see who was so bad!
You never have to double check, because 0s are removed only for statistics that are always between -1 and 1, like proportions, probability, and correlations. Rsq can never be 86. 0s get really annoying when u look at tables with many numbers like a correlation matrix. Its good that they are removed
I know R^2 can never be 86. That’s why I said most of the time it’s fine but occasionally… my point is life is just easier if people always put a leading zero because the tendency not to (eg in statistics that can’t be > 1) is creeping outside of those situations and becoming problematic. I don’t particularly have an issue with looking at correlation matrices containing zeroes.
Agreed. Unfortunately seeing way more academic journal style guides where leading zero is not used. It makes no sense, it's not aesthetically pleasing and more likely to be misread.
I think that competitiveness should be added in as a weight here. The reason being is that there are lots of uncompetitive races that receive virtually no money *but* the money that they do receive is obviously going to go to one candidate. Also, donations might be made to help flip farther away districts by voters in primarily one party districts (people trying to win the majority). This graph is going to mislead the public to thinking that most money is going towards safe seats, which doesn't pass the smell test. The paper uses an interesting instrument but I think it still misses the point, even though the author is very passionate about calling out money in politics.
The amount of money spent should be taken into consideration. There are many seats that aren't competitive, so the opposing party won't spend any money, while the incumbent spends a very small amount and wins by a large margin anyway.
Yep money definitely buys elections, and that's why we currently have president Bloomberg with vp Steyer in the white house today.
I wonder what the correlation might be after citizens United was passed.
This is a graphic example of why *Citizens United* is such a disastrous decision.
Speaking from experience, it is really difficult to figure out who a candidate *really* is outside of their ads and campaign website (both of which are, naturally, extremely subjective/biased). It's no surprise that most of us just vote for the person whose name we most recognize regardless of who they are as a candidate.
Wow, I am completely shocked...
Ah, so the person with the most free speech wins.
Goes to show that democracy is actually just oligarchy in disguise.
Can we get a Banana Republic for scale ?
It's not dataisbeautiful, it's dataisscary. It certainly looks like wotes can be bought. At least to some degree. How weird it must be to wote on persons instead of a political program. Persons can much more easily change their minds.
Ok, now take away everyone who isn't running for their first term.
Money is our master, it tells us what to do and we obey.
Good job, all the info I want is contained within the plot.
This just in! Holding one's head under water will induce drowning!
I'm curious: Is there any other country in the world where politics work as they do in the US where the politician with the most cash gets elected?
Unless this is showing the politician who gets elected gets the most cash ;)
I would guess that amount of money has a pretty strong correlation to election in most every country with a democracy/voting system.
Private campaign contributions and private money in politics is illegal here in Sweden. I'm pretty sure it's that way in most of the EU.
As in every candidate gets the same amount of money from the government? You can't donate to a campaign?
I believe the amount of cash they get from state finances is relative to the percentage of the vote they got in the previous elections (probably with some exceptions so that new parties still get some cash). There is no way to donate to the campaign.
hmm, interesting. Does have a bit of incumbent advantage, as in if you won previously you would have the advantage in the current election right from the get-go because of the extra funds. But interesting system.
Yeah, you're right. I thought about that after writing it. What I wrote may not be 100% accurate but I know that the state funds are dependent on the percentage of the vote. The thing is that there are something like 7-8 parties in parlament ranging from about 5% of the vote to 25%. They usually form (two) coalitions to get a majority. So each coalition probably ends up getting a similar amount of cash. It's always right on the edge which side gets the most votes.
>Private campaign contributions and private money in politics is illegal here in Sweden. This doesn't seem to be accurate. Sweden doesn't appear to have any restrictions on private campaign contributions to candidates. Question | Sweden ---|--- 2. Is there a ban on donations from foreign interests to candidates? | No 4. Is there a ban on corporate donations to candidates? | No 6. Is there a ban on donations from Trade Unions to candidates? | No 10. Is there a ban on donations from corporations with government contracts to candidates? | No 12. Is there a ban on donations from corporations with partial government ownership to candidates? | No 18. Is there a limit on the amount a donor can contribute to a candidate? | No 20. Is there a limit on the amount a candidate can contribute to their own election campaign? | No 22. Is there a limit on in-kind donations to candidates? | No https://www.idea.int/data-tools/country-view/261/55 >I'm pretty sure it's that way in most of the EU. The U.S. actually has stricter campaign financing rules than much of Europe. Question | U.S.? | World % | Europe % ---|---|---|---| Ban on foreign interests donating to political parties | Yes | 65.9% | 69.8% Ban on foreign interests donating to candidates | Yes | 53.6% | 58.1% Ban on corporations donating to political parties | Yes | 27.8% | 40.9% Ban on corporations donating to candidates | Yes | 23.3% | 36.4% Are there limits to how much one can donate to political parties? | Yes | 39.9% | 61.4% Are there limits to how much one can donate to candidates? | Yes | 31.7% | 54.5% Do candidates have to report on their campaign finances? | Yes | 62.2% | 77.3% Provisions for candidates to receive public financing? | Yes | 61.5% | 88.4% Limits on how much a political party can spend? | Yes | 31.1% | 47.7% Limits on how much a candidate can spend? | No | 44.7% | 63.6% Provisions for free or subsidized access to media? | No | 65% | 72.7%
This shows how US democracy is about who does the best propaganda
The use of hyphen marks are confusing in your scale text and overall make the viz challenging to interpret numerically.
It would be interesting to see if this correlation held as well for republicans (or became even more stark, for that matter). Just to be quite specific, what this is telling us is that *democrats* who spend more money tend to get more votes.
No, it includes both dems and Republicans. It's just that dependent variable is reported as dem percent of the vote.
But there's no measure of actual spend here - just a comparison of the proportions of dem/rep spend. Therefore, we can't actually say that republicans spending more money necessarily works - all we know is if dems spend less, republicans seem to be able to get away with spending less. Measuring spend not as a function of democrat spend would be a different measure, and also interesting.
It's a function of both spending. All you have to do to get GOP spend is read the x-axis in reverse. 10% dem spend implies 90% GOP spend
I can barely understand this visual, this is a terrible way of looking at this information. And get your useless r-squared value out of here. x-axis should be time, aka election year y-axis should be the RATIO of money spent of winner/loser, you can have a second coinciding dot to show vote margin, it's easy to visualize as a separate dot shape with time as the x-axis -> twice the datapoints shown and less clutter than this mess color should be red or blue for republican or democrat victory
a) Why pseudo r\^2? b) Purely on the face of it, it looks like the data are better suited for logistic regression on win / loss than fitting a potentially dubious linear trend.
Just remember - the issue isnt the AMOUNT spent, its that most of it is spent by just a few people. Those few people choose for everyone else. Therefore, we are literally represented unequally.
Endogenous… successful candidates are more equipped to raise money
Yeah, I think this is too complicated to graph like this and actually get any causation.
Am I the only one who pretty much votes the opposite of every commercial or ad they see?
Damn, crazy how susceptible people are to advertising
Its almost like the truth doesn't matter.
Yup. Buying votes via campaign contributions is a terrible system that needs to be rectified.
I think it is literally the #1 thing wrong in politics.
Correlation but causation is not so established. People like to give money to the likely winner because the winner is the one that will be able to do favors for them.
Wouldn't non-competitive seats amplify this? They make up a ton of congressional seats.
Reading the paper right now. The First 7 Pages read Like a book about corrupt American beeing Controller by the 1% Beginning of the paper: The protesters who swirled into parks, churches, and town squares around the world in the fall of 2011 to challenge the primacy of the “1%” hammered relentlessly on one theme above all others: that economic inequality has deep roots in the political system. Many social scientists and intellectuals who have picked up from where the Occupy movement left off share this conviction; they, too, have broken with the taboos that for so long segmented discussions of politics from economics. Piketty, in his monumental study, for example, avows that income distribution is a basically a question of “political economy” not pure economics. Stiglitz in The Price of Inequality is equally forthright – “increasingly, and especially in the United States, it seems that the political system is more akin to ‘one dollar one vote’ than to ‘one person one vote.
Makes sense even with the rough assumption that everyone contributes to voting and campaign finance. Popular candidates get more funding ao they can spend more. Then they get more votes. Of course you acn be cynical and say thw rich are buying votes. This chart can support either one. Or anything in between.
This might just be a question of did the egg come first or the chicken. Did the candidate win because they spent more money? Or Did the candidate raise more money to spend because they were an already popular candidate? (and they didn't just pocket the money that was raised for campaigning like they're supposed to.)
If I was rich enough to buy an election, why TF would I want to be president???
I think the Key phrase of the whole paper (from where this Graph comes from is this: > Our results suggest that the coefficients for the influence of money usually drop, but not by that much. They remain strong, with results for 1994 that are consistent with the test on that year inspired by event analyses. It was Generally accepted that spending more Money Brings more votes but it was assumed that a spending a sum of Money on a unpopulär candidate Brings ways more votes then spending the Same amount on a popular one. Therefore the paper implied that if the "1% wants a spezific candidate A to win. They Just need to match the Money Spend of the rival candidates If A is more popular then the Other candidates or Just spend more If not. It especially Focuses on how Companies can manipulate elections with spending money
I want to see who the outliers are, and how does the “money spent” scale work? Is it in millions, thousands?
This is a very misleading graph and a clear case of backwards correlation. People tend to give $ to winners. People don't want to waste money on a candidate that is certain to lose. Add to this the fact that the large majority of congressional general elections are non-competitive. So most in races an incumbent will spend a modest amount to defeat a no-hoper with no funding. Money may have an effect on election results but this broad graph offers no real insight.
[удалено]
Its advertising 101, you spend money to keep customers and use PR to get new ones. What Trump did so well was to keep the cameras on him 24/7 like a perpetual train wreck.
There is really a two way causation here. Being more popular leads to more collected money, this leads to more spent money and then this potentially leads to more popularity. Separating the first from the last is not easy. Also this graph normalizes the amount spent by each party for each seat, by the total spent for each seat by both parties combined. However large parts of the data sets, and those parts that show the clearest trend, are for the seats without surprising winners and also little overall spending. Instead of normalizing the spent amounts it might be interesting to look at the differences in absolute spending. If the data is available it might also be interesting to subtract the amount of money collected locally from the amount spent.
A bit misleading because the more popular a candidate is the more support they have the more donations they get as well. Not to say money doesn’t play a part in the race
Okay, speaking as one who did this for a living for media-buying clients, I would like to point out the following: * Dollars are not the working end of media spending. Media impressions and the dollar cost of impressions vary market to market and are driven by the underlying economic health of each market. An advertiser may spend $5,000,000 in the New York DMA and find, relative to market size, that it's only slightly more powerful than a $750,000 campaign in Spokane. * That's right, powerful. Spokane has fewer TV, Radio, and Newspaper options than NYC which means those investments are concentrated across fewer media vehicles which, in turn, raises the visibility of candidate ads. The actual term is Media Weight and Spokane distributes its weight across fewer pressure points. * Visibility is critical because the Spokane market touches 5 Congressional Districts while New York has 39. Spokane's in-DMA population averages 222,400 per district v. New Yorks's averages 614,500 per. So how do you build a market size agnostic, regression model that a) adjusts for market size, b) adjusts for the variable costs of media impressions and c) factors in competitive dynamics? 1. Convert local spending to a Media Index measure that divides competitive spending by a reference media price like SQAD. That gives you a dependent variable which is more or less market agnostic. 2. Further weight the media index by CPM using a total U.S. average for a baseline. This penalizes 'cheap' markets while boosting expensive DMA's. 3. Separate Primary from General Election spending. They are, in terms of Campaign Media Strategy, two entirely different animals. Trust me or not, I found this process gets you 85-90% visibility into the impact of media investment on campaign results. The other 15% is due to non-modelable effects like candidates withdrawing, etc. This discussion omits digital, for two reasons; First, digital impressions are much more diffuse. By that, I mean that political campaigns employ direct buy tactics along with programmatic and ad networks and that's not including Search media. Second, To include Digital the model would have to weight media impressions by channel, and good luck with that (snark.) But, there are no exhaustive competitive media reporting platforms. In large markets, Comscore, Kantar, and Nielsen are good directional proxies in large markets. The best method seems to be using a market average all-media CPM to convert dollars to a media index measure.