Replication Data for: Working Hand in Hand: Interest Groups and Cooperative Dynamics in Campaigns

Prior research on party-interest group and candidate-interest group dynamics highlights cooperative exchange, whereby resource-rich groups provide financial or logistical support to resource-constrained candidates and parties—frequently in implicit exchange for legislative influence. This paper introduces a new dimension to these cooperative dynamics, demonstrating how parties and candidates subsidize and shape interest group spending on elections using a strategy known as “redboxing.” Drawing on the first comprehensive dataset of instances of redboxing, I show that this strategy was used more than 800 times in 331 U.S. House and Senate races from 2018-2022. Computational text analysis further reveals that the major parties and their affiliated candidates employed redboxing to influence the content of almost \$170 million in “independent” interest group ad spending during the 2020 cycle alone. These findings underline the collaborative nature of modern campaigns, with parties and candidates routinely exploiting loopholes in election law to coordinate with outside allies.