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19 Election L.J. 1 (2020)

handle is hein.journals/enlwjr19 and id is 1 raw text is: Original Articles

ELECTION LAW JOURNAL
Volume 19, Number 1, 2020
© Mary Ann Liebert, Inc.
DOI: 10.1089/elj.2019.0593

Hidden Donors:
The Censoring Problem in U.S. Federal
Campaign Finance Data
R. Michael Alvarez, Jonathan N. Katz, and Seo-young Silvia Kim
ABSTRACT
Inferences about individual campaign contributors are limited by how the Federal Election Commission
(FEC) collects and reports data. Only transactions that exceed a cycle-to-date total of $200 are individually
disclosed, so that contribution histories of many donors are unobserved. We contrast visible donors and
hidden donors, i.e., small donors who are invisible due to censoring and routinely ignored in existing
research. We use the Sanders presidential campaign in 2016, whose unique campaign structure received
money only through an intermediary (or conduit) committee. These are governed by stricter disclosure stat-
utes, allowing us to study donors who are normally hidden. For the Sanders campaign, there were seven
hidden donors for every visible donor, and altogether, hidden donors were responsible for 33.8% of Sand-
ers' campaign funds. We show that hidden donors start giving relatively later, with contributions concen-
trated around early primaries. We suggest that as presidential campaign strategies change towards wooing
smaller donors, more research on what motivates them is necessary.
Keywords: campaign finance, small donors, 2016 election, data censoring, presidential campaigns

INTRODUCTION
T HE UNITED STATES HAS ESTABLISHED one of
the world's most comprehensive federal cam-
paign disclosure processes. The Federal Election
Commission (FEC), the federal entity which col-
lects and disseminates these disclosures, produces
data that are transparent, accessible, and up-to-
date. Consequently, there has been an enormous
amount of academic research on campaign finance,
in particular on campaign expenditures, in the U.S.
for the last few decades-see, for example, the re-
cent review by Dawood (2015). Yet as we argue
below, the FEC's data on campaign contributions
is incomplete, and accordingly, our understanding
of campaign contributions in the United States is in-
complete as well.
One key feature of disclosure regulations in the
U.S. is that currently each federal campaign com-
mittee only has to report to the FEC contributions

from individuals who have already given $200 in ag-
gregate to that campaign committee, either within a
year or a two-year election cycle according to the
committee type. The $200 threshold has been in
place for decades, and many donors' first few-in
some cases all-contribution records are censored.1
We call this the censoring problem in campaign fi-
nance data, and the campaign contributors whose
R. Michael Alvarez is a Professor of Political Science at the
California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California. Jona-
than N. Katz is the Kay Sugahara Professor of Social Sciences
and Statistics at the California Institute of Technology in Pasa-
dena, California. Seo-young Silvia Kim is a PhD candidate in
Social Sciences at the California Institute of Technology in Pasa-
dena, California.
'Prior to 1989, however, the data entry threshold of the Federal
Election Commission was set at $500. See the Federal Election
Commission's (FEC's) Thirty Year Report published in 2005.
Also, because the $200 restriction is with nominal dollars, the
data have to be filtered using inflation adjustments.

1

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