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Tapping Motives and Dynamics Behind Campaign Contributions: Insights From the Asian American Case

University Of Illinois At Urbana-Champaign

Campaign donors are sometimes characterized as investors who carefully allocate their financialresources to candidates and/or political action committees to maximize their influence.Although this theory has some veracity, it does not adequately describe all contributors. The patternsof Asian American contributions imply that their interests are strongly tied to ethnicityrather than to alternative influence-maximizing strategies. Indeed, contrary to popular belief,Asian Americans predominantly fund candidates of their own ethnicity. The campaign financedata are virtually devoid of pan-Asian coalitions. A detailed study of the behavior of AsianAmerican donors is useful in its own right. More important, an accurate portrait of the AsianAmerican donor highlights the crudeness of a strictly rational sketch of campaign contributorsand adds to our understanding of the logic behind political behavior.

Key Words: campaign finance • Asian American politics • racial/ethnic politics

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