Gender, Race, and Intersectionality in Campaign Finance

Abstract

Campaign finance research has given greater attention to race and gender, but, due to data limitations, only separately. Using new data on the ethnoracial and gender backgrounds of contributors, we provide the first estimates of the ethnorace-gender distribution of campaign contributions. We find that women of color are more underrepresented in campaign finance than predicted by existing analyses of race or gender alone. We also use within-district variation to compare how candidate race, gender, and their interaction affect the race and gender distributions of campaign contributions. We find that the effect of shared ethnorace is many times larger than that of shared gender or their interaction. Gender effects are heterogeneous by ethnorace and party; shared gender is most predictive for contributions from white and black Democratic women. The findings suggest a need for greater attention to intersectionality in research on political participation.