IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/pen/papers/17-022.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Inferring the Ideological Affliations of Political Committees via Financial Contributions Networks

Author

Listed:
  • Yiran Chen

    (Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania)

  • Hanming Fang

    (Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania)

Abstract

About two thirds of the political committees registered with the Federal Election Commission do not self identify their party affiliations. In this paper we propose and implement a novel Bayesian approach to infer about the ideological affiliations of political committees based on the network of the financial contributions among them. In Monte Carlo simulations, we demonstrate that our estimation algorithm achieves very high accuracy in recovering their latent ideological affiliations when the pairwise difference in ideology groups' connection patterns satisfy a condition known as the Chernoff-Hellinger divergence criterion. We illustrate our approach using the campaign finance record in 2003-2004 election cycle. Using the posterior mode to categorize the ideological affiliations of the political committees, our estimates match the self reported ideology for 94.36% of those committees who self reported to be Democratic and 89.49% of those committees who self reported to be Republican.

Suggested Citation

  • Yiran Chen & Hanming Fang, 2017. "Inferring the Ideological Affliations of Political Committees via Financial Contributions Networks," PIER Working Paper Archive 17-022, Penn Institute for Economic Research, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania, revised 10 Dec 2017.
    • Handle: RePEc:pen:papers:17-022
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://economics.sas.upenn.edu/sites/default/files/filevault/SSRN%2017_022.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Francesco Trebbi & Eric Weese, 2019. "Insurgency and Small Wars: Estimation of Unobserved Coalition Structures," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 87(2), pages 463-496, March.
    2. McKay Amy, 2010. "The Effects of Interest Groups' Ideology on Their PAC and Lobbying Expenditures," Business and Politics, De Gruyter, vol. 12(2), pages 1-23, August.
    3. McKay, Amy, 2010. "The Effects of Interest Groups' Ideology on Their PAC and Lobbying Expenditures," Business and Politics, Cambridge University Press, vol. 12(2), pages 1-21, August.
    4. Amy McKay, 2008. "A simple way of estimating interest group ideology," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 136(1), pages 69-86, July.
    5. Leung, Michael P., 2019. "A weak law for moments of pairwise stable networks," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 210(2), pages 310-326.
    6. Barberá, Pablo, 2015. "Birds of the Same Feather Tweet Together: Bayesian Ideal Point Estimation Using Twitter Data," Political Analysis, Cambridge University Press, vol. 23(1), pages 76-91, January.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Mason Dyana P., 2017. "Measuring Latent Constructs in Nonprofit Surveys with Item Response Theory: The Example of Political Ideology," Nonprofit Policy Forum, De Gruyter, vol. 8(1), pages 91-110, January.
    2. Juan D. Montoro-Pons, 2013. "Regulator preferences and lobbying efforts in rent-seeking contests," Chapters, in: Francisco Cabrillo & Miguel A. Puchades-Navarro (ed.), Constitutional Economics and Public Institutions, chapter 14, pages 257-278, Edward Elgar Publishing.
    3. Freille, S. & Avramovich, C. & Moncarz, P. & Sofietti, P., 2019. "Inside the revolving door: campaign finance, lobbying meetings and public contracts. An investigation for Argentina," Research Department working papers 1392, CAF Development Bank Of Latinamerica.
    4. Mason Dyana P., 2015. "Advocacy in Nonprofit Organizations: A Leadership Perspective," Nonprofit Policy Forum, De Gruyter, vol. 6(3), pages 297-324, November.
    5. Lskavyan, Vahe, 2014. "Donor–recipient ideological differences and economic aid," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 123(3), pages 345-347.
    6. Clark Muntean Susan, 2011. "Corporate Independent Spending in the Post-BCRA to Pre-Citizens United Era," Business and Politics, De Gruyter, vol. 13(1), pages 1-39, April.
    7. Vincent A. Floreani & Gladys López-Acevedo & Martín Rama, 2021. "Conflict and Poverty in Afghanistan’s Transition," Journal of Development Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 57(10), pages 1776-1790, October.
    8. Stoop, Nik & Verpoorten, Marijke & van der Windt, Peter, 2019. "Artisanal or industrial conflict minerals? Evidence from Eastern Congo," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 122(C), pages 660-674.
    9. Adlai Newson & Francesco Trebbi, 2018. "Authoritarian elites," Canadian Journal of Economics/Revue canadienne d'économique, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 51(4), pages 1088-1117, November.
    10. Aleberto Alesina & Guido Tabellini & Francesco Trebbi, 2017. "Is Europe an Optimal Political Area?," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Economic Studies Program, The Brookings Institution, vol. 48(1 (Spring), pages 169-234.
    11. Thomas Fujiwara & Karsten Müller & Carlo Schwarz, 2021. "The Effect of Social Media on Elections: Evidence from the United States," NBER Working Papers 28849, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    12. Joshua Y. Lerner, 2018. "Getting the message across: evaluating think tank influence in Congress," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 175(3), pages 347-366, June.
    13. Kojevnikov, Denis & Marmer, Vadim & Song, Kyungchul, 2021. "Limit theorems for network dependent random variables," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 222(2), pages 882-908.
    14. Michael P. Leung, 2022. "Dependence‐robust inference using resampled statistics," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 37(2), pages 270-285, March.
    15. Brown Richard S., 2016. "How do firms compete in the non-market? The process of political capability building," Business and Politics, De Gruyter, vol. 18(3), pages 263-295, October.
    16. Gehring, Kai & Langlotz, Sarah & Kienberger, Stefan, 2018. "Stimulant or depressant? Resource-related income shocks and conflict," Working Papers 0652, University of Heidelberg, Department of Economics.
    17. repec:hal:wpspec:info:hdl:2441/55pdkeigq8vqqft6muev00u59 is not listed on IDEAS
    18. Bryan S. Graham, 2019. "Network Data," Papers 1912.06346, arXiv.org.
    19. Julia Cage & Anna Dagorret & Pauline Grosjean & Saumitra Jha, 2020. "Heroes and Villains: The Effects of Combat Heroism on Autocratic Values and Nazi Collaboration in France," Sciences Po Economics Discussion Papers 2020-11, Sciences Po Departement of Economics.
    20. Walk, Erin & Garimella, Kiran & Christia, Fotini, 2023. "Displacement and return in the internet Era: Social media for monitoring migration decisions in Northern Syria," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 168(C).
    21. Keng-Chi Chang & Chun-Fang Chiang & Ming-Jen Lin, 2021. "Using Facebook data to predict the 2016 U.S. presidential election," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 16(12), pages 1-24, December.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Ideology; Network Analysis; Stochastic Block Models;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D85 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Network Formation
    • D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior
    • P16 - Political Economy and Comparative Economic Systems - - Capitalist Economies - - - Capitalist Institutions; Welfare State

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pen:papers:17-022. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Administrator (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/deupaus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.