Abstract
Previous research has shown that past participation can encourage future participation, but the literature offers competing predictions as to whether participating and winning has a different effect than participating and losing does. Combining campaign contribution data with state legislative, gubernatorial, and US Senatorial election returns, we employ a regression discontinuity design to estimate the effect of donating to a candidate who barely wins as opposed to one who barely loses. Our dataset comprises over 2 million donors across 17,000 state legislative, 180 gubernatorial, and nearly 500 Senate candidates, allowing us to estimate the causal effect with substantial precision and validity. Consistent with theories of habit-forming, and in contrast to many theories of control beliefs, we find that the causal difference between donating and winning and donating and losing is substantively trivial and, in most specifications, indistinguishable from zero. These results replicate across all three types of races.
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