The Kos Bump: The Political Economy of Campaign Fundraising in the Internet Age
23 Pages Posted: 19 Jul 2010 Last revised: 4 Jul 2014
Date Written: 2010
Abstract
The growth of political blogs has spawned much speculation about their impact on politics, but little hard evidence. We demonstrate that attention from political blogs helps candidates raise money during campaigns. Drawing on data from the 2005-2006 election cycle, we show that blogposts on the Daily Kos, a prominent leftwing blog, were associated with increased donations for the candidates that these blogposts endorsed. Our analysis uses a fixed effects framework and weekly data on Daily Kos attention and fundraising to mitigate potential threats to inference, including selection effects and reverse causation. The implication is that blogs and other new forms of media can directly affect on important political outcomes.
Keywords: campaigns, elections, blogs, fundraising
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