| I develop a statistical method to measure the ideology of candidates and contributors using campaign finance records. The method recovers ideological positions for incumbents that strongly correlate with ideological measures recovered from voting records, while simultaneously recovering positions for political action committees (PACs), unsuccessful challengers and open-seat candidates. The method shows promise as a platform for testing hypotheses about contribution behavior. I illustrate by examining which motivations best explain PAC contributions. The results reveal that ideology features prominently in the contribution behavior of PACs, but its influence varies considerably across categories of PACs. |
