Politicians' Twitter and Political Donations

Abstract: How does information about politicians affects their political donations? Existing theoretical research suggest that political donations can be driven by information about candidates, and with political donations being a signal of good quality candidates. Alternatively, political donations might be a way of lobbying for certain perks. With both information and political donations being potentially endogenous to locations, candidates, and characteristics of the campaign, it is difficult to identify the role of political information for campaign contributions. In this paper, we collected data on 2000+ accounts of politicians who started their twitter accounts between 2009 and 2013. We show that there is a positive kink in the amount of contributions associated with opening a Twitter microblog. We use data on Twitter penetration to ensure that our results survive in a difference-in-difference framework. We combine regression analysis with content analysis of the Twitter posts, to check that indeed the vast majority of these posts are not campaign-related. Our results suggest that politicians’ Twitter sharply increase information about them for certain groups of voters, and social media presence indeed helps to raise individual political donations.