Polarizing the Donorate: Charitable Giving and Negative Political Advertisements

Does inflammatory political rhetoric undermine the voluntary provision of public goods? This paper addresses this question by combining Form 990 data on charitable giving with Wesleyan Media Project data on political advertising and a text-based measure of charity ideology. Attack advertising creates political polarization, which discourages giving to ideological charities, and encourages giving to non-ideological charities. These results suggest that divisive political rhetoric may actually strengthen nonpartisan civil society.