Social Media, Money, and Politics: Campaign Finance in the 2016 US Congressional Cycle

TL;DR

This study investigates how social media activity by US Senate candidates in 2016 correlates with campaign fundraising, revealing that frequent and issue-focused posts are linked to increased donations, especially in terms of donation count.

Contribution

It is the first to quantify the financial benefits of social media campaigning using multi-platform candidate content and unsupervised theme analysis.

Findings

More frequent posting correlates with higher donations.

Issue-related content increases campaign funds.

Campaigning content has a stronger effect on donation count.

Abstract

With social media penetration deepening among both citizens and political figures, there is a pressing need to understand whether and how political use of major platforms is electorally influential. Particularly, the literature focused on campaign usage is thin and often describe the engagement strategies of politicians or attempt to quantify the impact of social media engagement on political learning, participation, or voting. Few have considered implications for campaign fundraising despite its recognized importance in American politics. This paper is the first to quantify a financial payoff for social media campaigning. Drawing on candidate-level data from Facebook and Twitter, Google Trends, Wikipedia page views, and Federal Election Commission (FEC) donation records, we analyze the relationship between the topic and volume of social media content and campaign funds received by all 108 candidates in the 2016 US Senate general elections. By applying an unsupervised learning approach to identify themes in candidate content across the platforms, we find that more frequent posting overall and of issue-related content are associated with higher donation income when controlling for incumbency, state population, and information-seeking about a candidate, though campaigning-related content has a stronger effect than the latter when the number rather than value of donations is considered.