Money in Politics

In this course, we will examine key questions in the literature on money in politics and develop skills to perform cutting-edge research in the field. The course will cover several major questions in the literature, such as: Does money affect election outcomes? Who donates to political campaigns? What motivates them? How do corporations and special interest groups influence political outcomes? Does campaign finance affect the quality of representation? What is the relationship between unequal participation and inequality? The rich data environment of campaign finance and lobbying offers a valuable resource for conducting empirical research on various areas of interest to political scientists, including campaigns and elections, the measurement of ideology, corporate political strategies, and elite preferences and behavior. This course will introduce students to available data resources and provide technical and methodological training on how to manage these large-scale databases and perform applied modeling and measurement applications.