The States of Small Individual Donors

Pundits and politicians portray small donors, those giving less than $200, as being qualitatively different from large donors. Commonly held beliefs tell us that small donors should show greater descriptive diversity and look more like the average American population. Studies of these donors were impossible because the federal government has set the disclosure threshold at the $200 level to make it impossible to study small donors. This dissertation makes use of state-level campaign finance data to describe who these donors are. This dissertation is descriptive and does not attempt to explain why they choose to give. By taking the basic data provided by the National Institute for Money in State Politics and providing a number of enhancements to the dataset scholars can better study small donors. This dissertation studies small donors along a number of dimensions including composition of gender, race, ethnicity, and socio-economic status. The second part of the dissertation compares small donor funded candidates to candidates primarily financed by large donors.