“Jenna Bednar and Elisabeth Gerber”:http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jbednar/WIP/irod_050211_wfigs.pdf have a very interesting paper using FEC data to figure out _where_ the donors to specific congressional campaigns come from. There is debate as to the role and nature of out-of-state contributions. For example, the legal scholar Larry Lessig has recently argued that such contributions are “evidence of the corruption of the US political process”:http://bostonreview.net/BR35.5/lessig.php
bq. Under our current system of campaign finance, however, there is [a fundamental gap] between the interests of voters and of contributors. … That gap has many dimensions, but the simplest to remark is the geographical source of campaign funds. In the most critical cases, the vast majority of contributions are not even from the voters. Opensecrets.org reports that 67 percent of contributions to John Kerry’s 2008 senate-reelection campaign came from outside Massachusetts. His Republican opponent received 73 percent of his funding from out-of-state donors. Maplight.org reports that since January of 2007 79 percent of contributions to California state legislators have come from out-of-district contributors. This gap between contributors and voters means that responsiveness to one is not necessarily responsiveness to the other. Once more, the sort of thing you need to do to make contributors happy is not the sort of thing you need to do to make voters happy.
Bednar and Gerber suggest a more sanguine interpretation, at least of House races. They argue that the boundaries of Congressional Districts often do not reflect the actual interconnections that form communities of interest within given geographic territories.
bq. We investigate the extent that regional geography influences where donors send their checks. Specifically, we look at the interconnectedness of metropolitan regions. Economic and social interconnectedness relates to the flow of citizens between communities. The more that citizens’ interests – social, cultural, or economic – are distributed across various places within a region, the more we consider that region to be interconnected. One of the most significant forms of interconnection is the economic relationship between communities, where citizens live and work in different places within the region.
They find that the more interconnected a region is, the more likely that candidates will receive donations from donors outside the district, but in the broader region.
bq. Our results indicate that when citizens are freed from the artificial constraints of electoral district boundaries, they often participate in congressional races that are outside their home district but within their economic region. As the economic region becomes more interconnected, donors are more likely to keep their money local: they invest in the campaigns of nearby candidates. The relationship is particularly strong in relatively compact metropolitan areas where commuters travel moderate distances throughout the region for work and regularly take public transit.
Obviously, these effects are more plausibly going to work for House candidates than Senate ones. Hence Lessig’s concerns may still be valid (although I think that there would be some good counter-arguments even still). But at the very least, Bednar and Gerber’s results suggest that some out-of-district contributions are due to regional interconnectedness rather than a gap between citizens and their representatives. One might indeed argue that the relevant gap is the one caused by artificial district boundaries rather than by out-of-district funding, and could be alleviated by some Matthew Yglesias style “state or regional PR arrangement”:http://thinkprogress.org/default/2011/05/31/232030/proportional-representation-can-ease-redistricting-woes/.