Adam Bonica

Adam Bonica is a professor of political science at Stanford University. His research examines how money in politics shapes democratic institutions, representation, and polarization in the United States. He is the creator of the Database on Ideology, Money in Politics, and Elections (DIME), the most comprehensive public resource for tracking political contributions and a tool for scholars and journalists studying political influence.

Bonica’s scholarship spans grassroots digital fundraising, mega-donor networks, judicial politicization, and the relationship between campaign finance and democratic backsliding. His work appears in leading journals across political science, law, and economics, and his book with Maya Sen, The Judicial Tug of War (Cambridge University Press, 2020), examines how political incentives shape the American judiciary. Bonica also contributes regularly to national debates through The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and MSNBC, and writes On Data and Democracy, a widely read Substack that translates empirical research into accessible analysis for journalists, policymakers, and the public.

Bonica’s project, “The Fundraising Doom Loop: How Money in Politics Prevents Depolarization,” explores the argument that corruption — specifically, a campaign finance system that couples predatory small-donor fundraising with dependence on a narrow class of mega-donors — is the central obstacle to reducing polarization in American democracy, and that historically the most effective path out of polarized, authoritarian-leaning eras has run through anti-corruption politics rather than ideological compromise. Drawing on the DIME database, large-scale data analyses, and comparative evidence from democratic transitions worldwide, the project will show that rejecting mega-donor money is both electorally viable and strategically advantageous.

May 2026