American Journal of Political Science
The super rich and the rest: Campaign finance pressures and the wealth of politicians
2025-07-07
We provide a comprehensive theoretical and empirical account of the relationship between campaign finance pressures and the wealth of politicians. We argue that the heavily right‐skewed wealth distributions observed in contemporary societies translate into similarly skewed distributions of campaign resources. Such unequal resources mean that greater pressures to spend on campaigns disproportionately benefit the very wealthy. We also identify several conditions that determine the extent of the financing advantages of the very rich, and at whose expense they accrue. We test our propositions using a unique original data set on the wealth of more than 23,000 national legislators from 41 countries, as well as by exploiting quasi‐random variation in financing pressures provided by recent campaign finance reforms in Brazil and Chile. The analyses consistently show that greater financing pressures lead to greater shares of wealthy, and especially very wealthy legislators, and that these advantages vary in ways consistent with our predictions.