This paper contributes to a growing literature that explains why individuals contribute to political campaigns. We build a panel dataset that follows contributors from primary to general elections to quantify the persistence of giving in political contests. Those who gave to winning candidates in the primary were most likely to contribute again in the general election. Next, we use an instrumental variable strategy to document that within party negative advertising decreases the probability that individuals contribute to their preferred party in the general election, regardless of whether they initially contributed to a winning or losing primary candidate.

Niebler, Sarah, and Carly Urban. Does Negative Advertising Affect Giving Behavior? Evidence From Campaign Contributions. Journal of Public Economics 146 (2017): 15-26. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0047272716302043

Sarah Niebler is a professor of Political Science at Dickinson College.

This author post-print is made available on Dickinson Scholar with the permission of the publisher.

© 2017. This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.

For more information on the published version, visit Science Direct's Website. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0047272716302043