Kenneth Miller (Political Science) and coauthor Brandice Canes-Wrone of Princeton University presented their paper "Individual Donors and Legislative Voting in the U.S. House" at hosted by the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton earlier this month. The research finds that members of the U.S. House of Representatives are responsive in their roll call voting to the policy preferences of their party’s national donor class, even after accounting for other well-established influences. Further, this responsiveness increases as members become more safe from losing reelection in their district, and that greater out-of-district contributions are associated with members’ increased responsiveness to their party’s national donor pool. Combined, these findings suggest that as redistricting and partisan sorting decrease electoral vulnerability for members, representation increasingly skews towards the donor class at the expense of district preferences.
