Collaboration Among Congressional Campaigns: The Sharing of Donor and Supporter Information

Abstract

Relative to legislative behavior, much of our knowledge about collaboration between congressional campaigns is limited to anecdotal or ethnographic accounts. To fill this gap, scholars have used legislative collaboration as a stand-in for studying electoral behavior. But do members of Congress who network for policy related purposes network similarly for campaign related purposes? Using a quasi-experiment of the 2016 election and nearly 3.2 million FEC records from 2010-2016, we empirically separate legislative and campaign behaviors for the first time, and show the similarity and differences in these processes. Specifically, we find that party and committee membership drive most campaign collaboration, though some is cross-party. This finding shines light on how campaign behavior can be entirely isolated from legislative behavior, yet is endeavored to obtain similar ends. While collaboration between members is routinely used to achieve policy goals, we now show that collaboration is also used to achieve campaign goals.