Do Politicians Grant Favors to Donors? A Field Experiment on Campaign Contributions and Access to Congressional Officials∗

Scholars, jurists, and citizens have long been concerned with the question of whether donations lead to an undue distortion of lawmakers’ behavior. After decades of research, methodological shortcomings have prevented a clearer understanding of the role of campaign donations on political outcomes from emerging. I begin with a methodological critique of observational research’s attempts to answer causal questions and then report the first randomized field experiment to investigate the effect of campaign contributions on access to congressional officials. A political organization attempted to schedule meetings between 191 Members of Congress and groups of their constituents who had donated to political campaigns. However, the organization randomly assigned whether it informed legislators’ offices that the requested meeting would be with previous donors. The revealed donors gained considerably more access to senior congressional officials than those thought to be only constituents. These findings have important implications for ongoing legal and legislative debates.