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The Impact of Public Finance Laws on Fundraising in State Legislative Elections
Abstract
Campaign finance reform has become a hotly debated issue at both the federal and state levels. Maine and Arizona became the first states to implement a fully subsidized public finance system for legislative candidates during the 2000 election. Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Hawaii have provided partial public funding to legislative candidates for several elections. The experiences of these states provide an opportunity to evaluate public funding programs. This study addresses the question: Does public funding reduce the time that candidates devote to fundraising? Using data comprising a representative nationwide sample, we demonstrate that candidates who accepted full public funding spent less time raising money than other candidates, including those who accepted partial public funding. We conclude that full public funding has the potential to redirect modern campaign efforts away from the “money chase,” freeing time for other campaign activities.
... It is widely acknowledged that candidates and office holders generally dislike fundraising and the large amount of time that must be dedicated to the task. Moreover, in the cases of candidates who come from outside the traditional party and fundraising networks, as female candidates often do, public financing is an effective way of lowering the amount of time a candidate must spend ''dialing for dollars'' (Francia and Herrnson 2003). Should the perceived costs of the election (literal monetary costs, plus encumbrances of time, energy, etc.) be lowered to a significant enough degree, public subsidies could well encourage more women to emerge as candidates. ...
... Yet, the campaign costs associated with a run for office go well beyond the literal costs of campaigning; though such costs are certainly of prime, strategic concern. Francia and Herrnson (2003) and Miller (2013) show that public financing systems may alleviate the costs associated with time spent in the money chase, provided they cover the full costs of campaigns. ...
A lack of gender parity amongst candidates for public office is of perpetual concern to political reformers. One reform that is suggested as a partial solution is the full public subsidy of election costs. In theory, "clean election" laws should dramatically lower the perceived costs of campaigns to potential candidates outside of traditional fundraising networks. If the perceived costs are lowered to a significant enough degree, public subsidies could encourage more women to run for office. Using panel data of potential candidates from Connecticut and Massachusetts, this article finds that the Citizens' Election Program may have led to some progress towards that goal. However, women's emergence decisions and attitudes concerning fundraising are more dependent upon active recruitment by civil society organizations and political parties, factors well beyond the reach of clean election laws.
... playing field where electoral outcomes are determined. These potentially fairer elections balance the resources available to campaigns and may increase competitiveness (Francia & Herrnson, 2003). Secondly, proponents believe that politicians, upon reaching elected office, are accountable to and influenced by the individuals or groups that financed their electoral success. ...
... Under a traditional system, they believe elected officials will be make governing decisions based on improving the welfare of their campaign's funders. Alternatively, a publicly financed system removes special interests from the electoral success equation leaving politicians free to work towards maximizing public welfare (Francia & Herrnson, 2003). ...
... Evidence exists that clean elections laws affect the fundraising behavior of candidates for public office and reduce the overall amount of dollars raised, part of the first goal mentioned above. Francia and Herrnson (2003) found that candidates who accept full public funding spend less time raising money than candidates who have to raise money via private contributions. Mayer and Wood (1995) found that partial public funding in Minnesota reduced the overall level of election spending. ...
... Although several other works have addressed the Arizona and Maine clean elections laws, few academic studies have been published analyzing the effect of the programs on competition in legislative races. Francia and Herrnson (2003) studied the effect of public financing on the amount of time candidates spent fundraising, but they did not analyze the impact on competitiveness. Daniel (2001) found that more candidates ran in Arizona's legislative races following the implementation of the public financing system. ...
Does complete public financing of campaigns enhance electoral competition? Arizona and Maine implemented similar clean elections programs for state-level races in 2000, providing an opportunity to examine the consequences of public financing. Employing two measures of competitiveness, I find that clean elections programs in both states significantly increased competition in districts where challengers accepted public funding. These findings suggest that public monies do not simply attract low-quality challengers and that access to campaign funds is an important determinant of competitiveness. As a result, while public financing programs are not panaceas for uncompetitive elections, such programs can enhance competition in races where money is accepted.
... 13 A common criticism of clean elections systems as they presently exist is that they fail to provide the candidates who avail of public funding with the resources necessary to mount competitive campaigns. Despite this, however, empirical scholars find that the introduction of clean elections systems occasions a marked reduction in the amounts of time that incumbents spend fundraising (e.g., Francia and Herrnson 2003). Anecdotal accounts indicate, further, that clean elections systems, despite being under-funded, occasion a decrease in the political influence of wealthy donors (e.g., Cha and Rapoport 2013). ...
Members of the United States Congress labor under a pressing fundraising imperative. Congresspersons believe that they must raise very large sums of money in order to secure re-election, to help their fellow partisans in Congress get re-elected, and to rise to positions of Congressional and party leadership. This leads members of Congress to accord tremendous importance to fundraising while in office. In this article, I draw on the normative scholarship on domination to offer a novel critique of the Congressional fundraising imperative. There is good reason, I argue here, to believe that the fundraising imperative promotes the domination of non-affluent Americans by their wealthy counterparts, thereby unjustifiably depriving citizens of ordinary means of their freedom.
... Fundraising is a serious time sink for candidates. Francia and Herrnson (2003) estimate that legislators who are given matching public campaign funds spend as much as 30% less on fundraising time, freeing their schedules for other activities. The Washington Post reported in 2013 that Democratic members of Congress spend four hours a day soliciting donors (Klein 2013). ...
Extant literature demonstrates that holding public office is financially lucrative. Yet little is known about which sitting legislators profit from office. Relying on original data of members of the Florida legislature, I estimate predictors of income growth among sitting legislators. I find that legislators whose vote share increases by 10 percentage points between elections report income growth of nearly $20,000. This finding is robust to estimation technique and model specification, indicating that electoral safety is tied to income growth. Lawmakers appointed to legislative posts with agenda-setting power do not obtain additional income. These data demonstrate the market values of electorally dominant legislators.
... Scholars of U.S. Congressional elections have examined from many angles how candidate quality affects the cost-benefit analysis that someone considering a candidacy will make, including the incumbency advantage, 164,165,166 party support of a candidacy, 167 and fundraising capacity. 168,169,170,171 This categorization of risk types is not, by any means, a comprehensive description of every potential risk consideration that an individual evaluates whether or not to seek political office. The crucial point is that electoral risk offers distinct risk-based considerations for someone considering running. ...
In the United States, women have long held the right to vote and can participate fully in the political process, and yet they are underrepresented at all levels of elected office. Worldwide, men’s dominance in the realm of politics has also been the norm. To date, scholars have focused on supply-side and demand-side explanations of women’s underrepresentation but differences in how men and women assess electoral risk (the risk involved in seeking political office) are not fully explained. To fill this gap, I explore how evolutionary theory offers insights into gendered differences in political ambition and the evaluation of electoral risk. Using the framework of life-history theory, I hypothesize that both cognitive and environmental factors in human evolution, particularly as they relate to sexual selection and social roles, have shaped the psychology of ambition in gendered ways affecting contemporary politics. Cognitive risk-assessment mechanisms evolving in the hominid line came to be expressed differently in females and males, in women and men. These gendered expressions plausibly reflect differentiable environmental pressures in the past and may help explain behaviors in and barriers to women’s electoral political activity in the present. If so, then the success of efforts to increase such activity — or, regressively, to suppress it — may be better understood.
... He finds that in both states competitiveness increased following the implementation of public funding of campaigns. These laws have also been shown to increase the number of candidates for office (Daniel 2001) and reduce the amount of time candidates must spend raising money (Francia and Herrnson 2003). ...
Does the source of campaign funds influence legislative polarization? We develop competing theoretical expectations regarding the effects of publicly financed elections on legislative voting behavior. To test these expectations, we leverage a natural experiment in the New Jersey Assembly in which public financing was made available to a subset of members. We find that public financing exerts substantively negligible effects on roll-call voting. We then find a similar result in an examination of state legislatures. We conclude that, counter to the logic of the US Supreme Court, pundits, and reformers, the source of campaign funds exerts minimal influence on polarization.
... The survey was deployed in several waves via three media: mailed instruments, an electronic interface, and telephone. Of 2,971 candidates in the population, the survey yielded 1,022 responses overall, for a response rate of 34.4%, which is consistent with previous surveys of candidate populations (Francia and Herrnson, 2003;Howell, 1982). I retain survey data from candidates who faced major-party opposition and who responded to the relevant behavioral questions. ...
Recent evidence suggests that women overcome the potential negative impact of gender stereotypes by emerging when they are stronger candidates than men. I leverage an original survey of state legislative candidates to determine whether women devote more time to their campaigns. I find that women on the whole, and those who had previously been elected to a political office in particular, invested more of their personal time into the campaign than men. This difference is driven by the fact that women are more likely to forgo employment during the election. These findings suggest that women are more likely than men to arrange their personal obligations in such a fashion that they can run stronger campaigns.
... G. Miller 2011a;. This is presumably because Clean Elections candidates spend less time fundraising (Francia and Herrnson 2003) and more time interacting with voters relative to those who fund their campaigns solely with private funds (M. G. Miller 2011b; 2014). ...
We investigate whether Maine and Arizona’s Clean Elections laws, which provide public funding for state legislative candidates, are responsible for producing a new cadre of legislators who are unusually ideologically extreme. We find that there is essentially no important difference in the legislative voting behavior of “clean” funded legislators and traditionally funded ones in either Arizona or Maine: those who are financed by private donors are no more or less ideologically extreme than those who are supported by the state. This finding calls into question some concerns about the effects on polarization of money generally and public funding in particular.
... Similarly, state parties are having a harder time getting the attention of potential donors, as they contend with the wave of citizen's groups, PACs, non-profit organizations, all clamoring for citizen support (Hershey 2011). Moreover, very few state legislative candidates depended on the state party organizations anymore for campaign support (Hershey 2011;Francia and Herrnson 2003). ...
In this paper, I begin with a relatively simple question,"How have the national and state political parties evolved in their ideological positions over time?" That is, while we know that the national parties have grown to be ideologically distinct and more polarized over time, we know considerably less about how the state parties have changed in this same period. In addition to this, I also consider the relationship between political parties at the state and national level, examining if the state parties become more like the national parties over time. Drawing on roll-call and survey data from the US Congress and five state legislatures over a twenty year period, I find that there continues to be substantial heterogeneity in the ideological composition of the party systems. Not only do intra-state and inter-state ideological differences still persist among partisan elites, but the pattern of political polarization itself differs substantially as well. * Prepared for presentation at the 2011 State Politics and Policy Conference; Dartmouth, NH; June 2nd-4th I gratefully acknowledge Jeff Lewis, Greg Combs, Seth Masket and particularly Gerald Wright for their generosity with sharing data. I have benefited greatly from the advice of, and comments from, Gerald Wright, Marjorie Hershey, William Bianco and Mike Ensley. Any remaining errors are, of course, my own.
... According to a study in American Politics Research, candidates who participate in full public funding programs spent sixty-six percent less time doing fundraising. 351 The study also found that candidates who participated in public funding spent just eight percent of their personal schedules on fund-raising, as compared with twenty-four percent for other major party candidates. 352 Moreover, even with all of the positive developments, money still carried the day in the 2008 election cycle. ...
... Minnesota's public financing system is considered a "partial" public financing system because participating candidates also raise private funds throughout their campaigns. 40 Minnesota candidates apply for public financing by filing a Public Subsidy Agreement (PSA) by September 1 of the election year, and candidates cannot reverse their decision to participate in the public financing program. Any candidate signing this agreement qualifies to receive public funds, though unopposed candidates are not eligible for public funding. ...
Electoral competition is essential to democracy. Yet the incumbency rate in state-house legislative campaigns is nearly 95 percent. This report examines campaign contribution limits and the impact limits can have on electoral competition. The research on which this report is based was inspired by a 2006 U.S. Supreme Court decision that overturned low contribution limits. The data presented here refutes the Court's assumptions that low contribution limits damage challengers and shows that the lowest contribution limits, those set at $500 or below, enhance challengers' ability to campaign against incumbents in state legislative races. Though public financing systems also increase electoral competition, the Brennan Center's research suggests that incumbents nonetheless continue to opt for public financing systems. Of course, enhanced competition under low limits is only one factor to be considered. Competition, after all, is one key goal in electoral reform, but not the only one. We may wish also to encourage citizen participation and voter engagement. But if we are looking for reasons not to enact low limits, a deleterious impact on competition is not one of them. For this reason, the Supreme Court was wrong in Randall v. Sorrell. Our joint findings make it plain: low contribution limits and public financing substantially narrow the gap between incumbents and challengers. These reforms can be mutually enhancing as reasonable contribution limits are central to a well-functioning public financing system. Incumbency will continue to provide electoral advantages. However, decreasing the vote margins between votes cast for incumbents and their challengers signals greater electoral competiveness and, as such, strengthens democracy.
... Public funds come from a tax check-off that allows taxpayers to direct those funds to a qualified political party, and from an annual appropriation. Minnesota's public financing system is considered a "partial" public financing system because participating candidates also raise private funds throughout their campaigns but must agree to a spending limit when accepting public financing (Francia and Herrnson 2003). Minnesota candidates apply for public financing by filing a Public Subsidy Agreement (PSA) by September 1 of the election year, and candidates cannot reverse their decision to participate in the public financing program. ...
This paper analyzes the effect of public financing on the competitiveness on elections. It shows that states with public financing have more competitive elections in state assembly races than states without. The paper also analyzes the fortunes of those candidates for the Maine House of Representatives who accept public financing in Maine. The results from this analysis show that accepting public financing increases incumbents' vote share by 2 percentage points and challengers' vote share by 3 percentage points.
... Such funding may make becoming a candidate less costly because it alleviates some of the burden normally placed on the candidate. For example, using a nationwide sample of candidates who ran for state legislature from 1998 to 2000 Francia and Herrnson (2003) find publicly funded candidates spend less time over the course of their campaign devoted to fundraising. Thus, offices in which candidates receive public funding could, in theory, alleviate part of the cost associated with becoming a candidate, which in turn increases the expected utility a potential candidate has for becoming an actual candidate. ...
The cost of running for office: How electoral campaign laws structure candidate entry in U.S. elections
We examine the prevalence of illiberal attitudes among aspiring state legislative candidates in the United States. While extensive research has questioned underlying levels of support for liberal democratic principles among the general public in the United States, we are the first to document the extent to which illiberal attitudes are present among the rising class of political leadership in the United States. We find that while the support for democratic principles is relatively high, there are substantial portions of candidates willing to encourage undemocratic behaviors in some areas. We also see some notable differences between candidates of the two major parties. Specifically, while Republicans are substantially more likely to agree that it is sometimes necessary to challenge election results when they lose, Democrats are more tolerant of restrictions—both from government and employers—on extreme viewpoints. Overall, our findings suggest that support for many democratic principles are high, but certain components of democracy may not be well sustained by those who aspire to elected office.
Although judicial elections are considered a method of keeping state courts—otherwise insulated from public pressure—accountable, the private financing of judicial campaigns has been met with significant criticism. In particular, the perception that campaign contributions can buy favorable case outcomes for contributors to judicial candidates may pose problems for judicial legitimacy. While some scholars and advocacy groups have advanced proposals which seek to eliminate private financing from judicial elections, research has yet to demonstrate a link between the public’s evaluations of a court’s legitimacy and the campaign financing system the state employs. In this paper, we present the results of a survey experiment that examines the public’s evaluations of judicial legitimacy under different campaign financing schemes. We find evidence supportive of our core hypothesis: respondents viewed courts with publicly financed elections as more legitimate than those with privately financed elections. This study helps to reinforce the viability of public financing by empirically demonstrating that the public views a state supreme court elected using the public financing model as more legitimate and less susceptible to donor pressure than one selected using privately financed models.
Objetivo: Examinar a distribuição dos valores do FEFC destinados aos candidatos a governador nas eleições de 2018, assim como outros dois tipos de recursos financeiros. Para tanto, analisa a Reforma Eleitoral Brasileira ocorrida em 2017, destacando a criação do Fundo Especial de Financiamento de Campanha (FEFC), que repassou R$ 1,7 bilhão aos partidos políticos brasileiros em 2018. Utiliza literatura que afirma sobre o conflito informacional apresentado pela Teoria da Agência e a participação social no processo eleitoral.
Metodologia: Utilizando uma amostra de 193 candidatos, a metodologia utilizada adotou uma abordagem quali-quanti, com análise de estatística descritiva e aplicação do teste de Kruskal-Wallis, além de um estudo documental que consistiu na análise dos extratos de prestação de contas dos candidatos publicados pelo Tribunal Superior Eleitoral (TSE). Deste modo, analisaram-se as distribuições dos três tipos de recursos (Outros Recursos, Fundo Partidário e FEFC) entre as regiões brasileiras, assim como as devoluções (sobras de campanha) declaradas pelos candidatos.
Resultados: Os resultados indicam que cerca de 60% de todos os recursos financeiros utilizados pelos candidatos estudados foram originados do fundo instituído pelo governo. Das cinco regiões brasileiras, o Sudeste representou os candidatos que mais gastaram com dois tipos de recursos: Outros Recursos e Fundo Partidário; enquanto a região Nordeste figurou como a região com maior recebimento de recurso do FEFC.
Contribuições do Estudo: O estudo contribui com a verificação da distribuição financeira dos candidatos a governador no âmbito nacional. Tendo em vista que os pleiteadores gastaram mais do FEFC e devolveram menos desse mesmo recurso, em relação aos tipos de financiamento, indica-se uma priorização por parte dos candidatos do consumo do FEFC, resguardando assim recursos próprios e de origem partidária.
During each election cycle, the city of Seattle distributes four 200. We find statistically insignificant evidence of decreases in private donations, although our point estimates suggest moderate-to-substantial crowd-out ratios. We further estimate a highly significant 86% increase in number of candidates coupled with substantial decreases in incumbent electoral success. These results provide some of the first causal evidence of the effect of decentralized public campaign finance schemes, while speaking to the impacts of campaign regulation more generally on donation activity, candidate entry, and incumbency advantage.
Does public campaign financing improve representation by reducing politicians' reliance on wealthy donors as advocates claim, or does it worsen representation by expanding the candidate marketplace to give extreme and nonrepresentative candidates an electoral boost? We conduct a novel analysis of public financing programs in Arizona, Connecticut, and Maine to causally identify the effect of a legislator's funding status on how closely she represents constituent preferences. Using multiple identification strategies, we show that candidates who exclusively use public campaign financing are more extreme and less representative of their districts than nonpublicly financed candidates. Our findings add new evidence to the electoral reform debate by demonstrating how replacing private campaign donations with public financing can actually damage substantive representation. We also advance the scholarship on how institutions affect substantive representation and candidate positioning as they respond to new campaign financing structures.
Efforts to reform the U.S. campaign finance system typically focus on the corrupting influence of large contributions. Yet, as Raymond J. La Raja and Brian F. Schaffner argue, reforms aimed at cutting the flow of money into politics have unintentionally favored candidates with extreme ideological agendas and, consequently, fostered political polarization. Drawing on data from 50 states and the U.S. Congress over 20 years, La Raja and Schaffner reveal that current rules allow wealthy ideological groups and donors to dominate the financing of political campaigns. In order to attract funding, candidates take uncompromising positions on key issues and, if elected, take their partisan views into the legislature. As a remedy, the authors propose that additional campaign money be channeled through party organizations—rather than directly to candidates—because these organizations tend to be less ideological than the activists who now provide the lion’s share of money to political candidates. Shifting campaign finance to parties would ease polarization by reducing the influence of “purist” donors with their rigid policy stances. La Raja and Schaffner conclude the book with policy recommendations for campaign finance in the United States. They are among the few non-libertarians who argue that less regulation, particularly for political parties, may in fact improve the democratic process.
We study the relationship between the level of compensation and time use for US state legislators. Using survey data on time use, we show that higher salary is robustly associated with legislators spending more time on fundraising. In contrast, higher salary is also robustly associated with less time spent on legislative activities and has no clear relation to time spent on constituent services. The fundraising results are particularly strong for legislators who do not intend to run for higher office. Our results are consistent with an interpretation that higher salary raises the value of office, and politicians respond with more fundraising because increased fundraising raises the chance of getting re‐elected more than does increased legislative activity. Back‐of‐the‐envelope calculations suggest that a par an représenterait 13 heures de collecte de fonds en plus, mais 18 heures d’activités législatives en moins annuellement.
An important dimension of party positioning remains largely unexamined—that is, the clarity with which parties present policies to the electorate. Moreover, the effects of private campaign contributions on party positions are also vastly understudied. We address these gaps using a unique new data set on private contributions to political parties in eight Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries from the early 1990s to the present. We argue that parties are incentivized to present increasingly ambiguous, or broad appeal, policy positions as a result of increased private campaign contributions. Broad appeal campaigns allow parties to appease their donors with more extreme policy preferences while maintaining the support of their more moderate base supporters. We find support for this argument and show that increasing donations are associated with increased policy ambiguity. Using new data, this article is the first to examine an important connection between political finance and party positioning on a cross-national and time-series basis.
Conventional wisdom holds that public campaign financing can diversify the socioeconomic makeup of candidate pools and, therefore, of U.S. elected officials, which could make U.S. public policy more responsive to lower socioeconomic status (SES) citizens. I argue that in addition to the absence of a positive relationship between public financing and candidate socioeconomic diversity, public financing, depending on the program design, may, in fact, reduce candidate socioeconomic diversity. Using occupational data on state legislative candidates in public financing state Connecticut and two paired control states to execute a difference in difference analysis, I demonstrate that when public financing is available, fewer low SES candidates run for state legislative office, and those who do run are not more likely to win and are less likely to utilize public financing.
Using survey data from more than 500 legislative candidates in 17 states during the 2008 election, I examine whether state house candidates who devote more time to their campaign win a larger share of the major-party vote. Consistent with previous work studying campaign spending in state legislative elections, I find a positive and significant association between campaign time and vote percentage for challengers - but not incumbents - in incumbent-contested elections.
The nomination of ideologically extreme candidates in party primaries has led many scholars and observers to speculate about the role played by different kinds of primary systems. Models of candidate competition that account for the two-stage nature of the electoral process suggest that more restrictive primary systems produce more ideologically extreme candidates. In contrast with previous research that examines the relationship between primaries and legislative ideology, we focus on how primary systems affect the ideological extremity of candidates’ campaign platforms. Using data on more than 85,000 major party candidates for Congress and state legislatures from 1980-2012, we find no evidence that the restrictiveness of primary participation rules is systematically associated with candidate ideology.
The implementation and expansion of public funding programs around the US over the past decade raised the possibility of major changes in the financing of campaigns at the state and local level. Advocates claimed that these programs increased electoral competition, reduced the influence of campaign contributors and lobbyists, and changed the distribution of political power. While there was evidence of a modest increase in competitiveness, primarily through reducing the number of incumbents who ran uncontested, the longer-term pattern has shown no significant change in incumbency reelection rates, margins of victory, or legislature demographics. Claims of major policy change have also been overstated. The Supreme Court’s rejection of spending triggers for additional grant awards in Arizona Free Enterprise PAC v. Bennett makes full public funding programs less attractive, since publicly funded candidates are less able to keep pace with high-spending opponents or independent expenditures. Future research should focus on how these programs affect the way that candidates and legislators engage with the public.
In June of 2010, the Government Accountability Oce (GAO) released a report that evalu-ates of the eects of full public funding in Arizona and Maine. The report seeks to evaluate the policy eects of public funding in the states with regard to several stated goals of its support-ers, including slower campaign spending growth, diminished interest group inuence, enhanced political participation, and heightened electoral competitiveness. The GAO's paper is timely considering that full funding programs are becoming both more common and more visible to the public at large. The GAO's analysis contains several interesting ndings, and its publication marks a good opportunity for political scientists and policy analysts to compare notes. Combining the con-tributions from each provides a more complete picture of what is known and unknown in the study of publicly funded elections. In this paper, I review the ndings of the GAO report as well as those of a growing number of scholars who have examined the topic. I describe what the GAO, political scientists, and policy analysts have found with regard to public election funding, as well as opportunities that remain for further research. Where applicable, I supplement this review with basic analysis of additional data. This essay should therefore be useful both for political scientists and the policy community.
There is not a general consensus among scholars about whether public campaign funding initiatives increase electoral competitiveness. U.S. focused research has found the effects of Clean Election (CE) funding present mixed outcomes (Mayer and Wood 1995; GAO 2003; Mayer, Werner, and Williams 2004; Werner and Mayer 2007) On the one hand, research has found that Clean Election funding creates more competitive elections (Bardwell 2002; Mayer, Werner, and Williams 2004). While on the other, Clean Election funding scholars have found that public funding of state legislative candidates has not caused elections to become more competitive (Mayer and Wood 1995; GAO 2003). One reason for the difference in the research literature is likely a result of the program being in its early years of implementation in the U.S. This paper provides a new technique for estimating the short-term and long-range effects of the program by experimenting on the New Jersey case which is designed to cope with limited data. It accomplishes this by creating simulated elections that are based on the lessons-learned in Arizona and Maine, as well as on structural constraints present in New Jersey. The experiment's results confirm the impact of Clean Elections is mixed: The impact of Clean Election funding increases infra-party competition but does not increase inter-party competition. Nevertheless, while the impact of Clean Elections does show some encouraging signs for proponents of electoral reform, it is unlikely to transform the electoral landscape by making elections more competitive.
Since public election financing was first implemented during the wave of post-Watergate reforms, the burning question has been, "does it work?" Evaluations of public financing have focused on its primary objectives, which are designed to address familiar grievances: Elections are too expensive and not competitive enough. Corporate PACs and other "special interests" contribute disproportionately to incumbents because they are interested in purchasing influence. Candidates must devote so much time to fundraising that little is left for other campaign tasks. Lost in these considerations, however, is the fact that mandated financial parity changes the strategic environment candidates function in, altering their decision making and potentially changing the nature of elections. As fully subsidized elections gain increasing ubiquity in the United States, reformers must decide whether this is a cost worth bearing.
This paper assesses the effect of the Supreme Court decision, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, on politics and policies. The ruling gives corporations the constitutionally-protected right to spend money on political broadcasting to defeat or support candidates. The analysis compares states with and without the ban on corporate political spending to observe whether differences exist with respect to 3 factors: the amount of business-related money in elections, the electoral outcomes, and policy consequences. Overall, the results suggest that Citizens United will likely increase independent spending by business groups, particularly on behalf of Republican candidates. But it seems likely that the overall effect of removing the corporate spending ban is that all groups will increase election-related spending. Moreover, corporations will continue to emphasize traditional strategies of giving contributions through PACs. There is no evidence that lifting a ban on corporate spending will help elect more Republicans or tilt policies toward business interests.
Assumptions about the empirical effects of various campaign finance proposals underpin the ideological and practical positions of public officials, academics and other advocates or opponents of different types of reform. But while the debate rages on, few have taken the time to determine whether these assumptions are empirically measurable or accurate. In regards to even some of the most widely discussed types of reform, such as contribution limits, few have asked the simple question: what is its effect on the way people vote or on the outcome of elections? A small cadre of political scientists has attempted to answer these questions by examining the impact that different state campaign finance regimes have had on state elections. Unlike the federal government, which has been relatively reticent to experiment, the states have truly lived up to their billing as "laboratories of reform," providing researchers with a myriad of different regimes and several decades of data on which to evaluate them. Those researchers that have exploited this wealth of information have been able to test and, often, to challenge existing assumptions about the impact of different types of reform. A complete review of all of the existing efforts made by political scientists to examine and quantify the impact of various state campaign finance reform efforts reveals an interesting picture. Many of the current assumptions about campaign finance reform may very well be wrong while several others have never been tested. In sum, a review of the existing literature yields many answers but may leave even more questions.
Objective. Campaign costs have grown rapidly in recent years. This analysis considers the amount of money candidates allocated in running for the state legislature. What factors associated with candidates, districts, and states are responsible for variations in campaign costs? Of particular concern is the impact of campaign finance regulations. Are laws aimed at restricting contributions effective at reducing overall levels of campaign spending as is often assumed to be the case? Methods. This analysis examines spending by 3,253 state legislative candidates running in twenty-seven states in the mid-1990s. Results. A number of factors are found to influence campaign spending although these effects often vary by type of candidate. In particular, contribution limits and public funding reduce spending for incumbents while public funding leads to higher levels of challenger spending. Conclusions. Campaign finance laws affect spending levels, but candidate-and district-level factors also have a large impact. Several of these findings have implications for understanding the role of money in elections and for anticipating the effects of possible reform measures.
The role of money in the U.S. electoral process has become more and more controversial in recent years. Following the Buckley ruling and other legislation in 1996, candidates and political parties are free to raise virtually unlimited soft money, making money perhaps the most significant factor in a campaign’s success. In Moey Rules, Anthony Gierzynski theorizes that, under our current system of financing elections, our political process has tilted too far in favor of political freedom, at the expense of political equality. Gierzynski examines the historical roots of the campaign finance dilemma, demonstrates its effects on the local, state, and national levels, and projects the long-term outcomes for American politics.
This paper advances a theoretical model that explains organizations' nonresponse to surveys as a predictable aspect of organizational behavior and structure. We argue that survey researchers must take into account the authority, capacity, and motive to respond of both the organizations sampled and the designated respondent within the organization. Our analysis identifies a series of organizational sources of nonresponse that have clear consequences for final sample bias. These include resource independence from the environment, subsidiary status, information dispersal in large establishments, and lack of staff dedicated to information processing. We provide suggestions for future organizational survey design and for analysis strategies to cope with sample selection bias.
In the following analysis, we provide an assessment of the effect of campaign finance reform on campaign spending and electoral competition in gubernatorial campaigns. The work improves on prior research by considering a longer, more comprehensive time frame (1978-1997) and by examining the effects of several different components of reform (contribution limits, public financing, and spending limits) within a single analytic framework. We find that spending limits reduce candidate spending and have an indirect and negative effect on electoral competition. The negative effects of spending limits, however, are heavily contingent on the level at which the limit is set. Contribution limits are associated with increased disparities in candidate spending and increased incumbent spending but have no direct effects on electoral competition. Overall, whether campaign finance reform enhances or inhibits electoral competition depends very much on the combination of spending limits, contribution limits, and public financing enacted in a given state.
The lack of full participation in sample surveys threatens the inferential value of the survey method. We review a set of
conceptual developments and experimental findings that appear to be informative about causes of survey participation; offer
an integration of that work with findings from the more traditional statistical and survey methodological literature on nonresponse;
and, given the theoretical structure, deduce potentially promising paths of research toward the understanding of survey participation.
Clarify is a program that uses Monte Carlo simulation to convert the raw output of statistical procedures into results that are of direct interest to researchers, without changing statistical assumptions or requiring new statistical models. The program, designed for use with the Stata statistics package, offers a convenient way to implement the techniques described in: Gary King, Michael Tomz, and Jason Wittenberg (2000). "Making the Most of Statistical Analyses: Improving Interpretation and Presentation." American Journal of Political Science 44, no. 2 (April 2000): 347-61. We recommend that you read this article before using the software. Clarify simulates quantities of interest for the most commonly used statistical models, including linear regression, binary logit, binary probit, ordered logit, ordered probit, multinomial logit, Poisson regression, negative binomial regression, weibull regression, seemingly unrelated regression equations, and the additive logistic normal model for compositional data. Clarify Version 2.1 is forthcoming (2003) in Journal of Statistical Software.
This study reports the results of examining the reasons for participant refusal in industrial mail surveys. The existing literature provides us with very little knowledge on this topic. Managers who did not respond to a previous questionnaire were called and asked to indicate their reasons for 'refusal'. Referring to refusers as an information source, this study is among the first applying such a research design. In general, time constraints ('I am too busy'), technical characteristics of the questionnaire ('too long'), and a lack of value provided for organisations ('no benefit for company') are the most frequently cited reasons for refusal. Based on our research findings we also provide the reader with a discussion of the results and implications for future research.
Public financing schemes are often promoted as means of increasing the competitiveness of legislative elections and changing the way that candidates raise campaign funds. We investigate the impact that Wisconsin's system of public financing of state legislative elections, established in 1977, has had on these variables. Having compared trends in the pre- and postreform period, we find no evidence that providing challengers with public money has made elections more competitive, although it has narrowed the spending gap between incumbents and challengers. Most important, public financing has not increased the number of challengers, as incumbents increasingly face no opposition at all. We argue that challengers consider the overall strategic environment, and not just the question of fundraising, when making the initial decision to run. The availability of public money does little to encourage challenges to safe incumbents. While some changes in Wisconsin's system might marginally increase the likelihood of challenges, we conclude that public funding, by itself, cannot significantly change the competitiveness of legislative elections. The year 1992 was critical for legislative elections. Members of Congress were stung by one scandal after another: the savings and loan crisis, bounced checks, and grave ethical lapses. Citizens in a number of states put on the ballot, and activist groups sought to break the hold that alleged special interests have on the legislative process. The key criticisms revolved around two perceived shortcomings of the electoral process: first, that incumbents become entrenched and impossible to beat because of fundraising advantages and perquisites of office; second, that they are beholden to special interests and political action committees for their campaign funds and consequently subordinate the collective good to particularized interests. Public disillusionment with Congress filtered down to the state level, with a number of states moving to term limits and other restrictions on state legislatures. Campaign finance reform remains a controversial and
Uncontested seats are far more common in U.S. state legislative elections than in U.S. House elections. But the incidence of uncontested seats varies across the states. In this paper, I attempt to explain that variance. Using pooled data on state legislative elections from 1992 to 1996, I test relationships suggested by the literature on uncontested seats in U.S. House elections. In addition, I also look at important differences among the state legislatures, such as level of professionalization, the competitiveness of the state's electoral system, the use of multimember districts, and the institution of term limits. I find that the value of a seat, measured either by professionalization level or member pay, and the competitiveness of the state's electoral system are powerful variables in explaining the incidence of uncontested seats across the states. Region also is important, with state legislatures in the South suffering a higher percentage of uncontested seats than state legislatures in the North.
Between 1972 and 1980 seventeen states enacted legislation to provide public funding of state-level election campaigns. These public campaign funding programs vary on four key policy dimensions. States are treated as "laboratories of reform" in which variations on a common policy have been introduced and are examined systematically. Assessment of the partisan impact of public campaign policies reveals that the majority party is generally advantaged in absolute dollar amounts regardless of policy variations. However, depending on the procedures of collecting and allocating funds, minority parties may gain more from public funding programs than their numerical strength in the electorate would warrant. The logical consequences of different patterns of collection and allocation policies for majority and minority candidates and parties are presented and questions about the impact of public campaign finance reform on practical electoral and party politics in the states are raised.
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Our analysis uses simulations to consider the likely impact of campaign finance reform on electoral outcomes and electoral competitiveness. The analysis improves upon previous research by both utilizing more than a single econometric model as a basis for the simulations and utilizing a wide range of campaign finance scenarios. Conclusions as to the likely impact campaign finance reform has on electoral competitiveness rely on the model employed and the type of campaign finance reform considered.
Serious Money offers detailed analysis of the relationship between fundraising methods and contributing decisions in presidential nomination campaigns, based largely upon newly conducted surveys of contributors to both the 1988 and 1992 campaigns. Brown, Powell and Wilcox explore the fundamental differences detween direct mail solicitation and personal-solicitation networks, and how candidate resources dictate the use of unique methods of solicitation. Candidate resources analysed include home state power bases, access to national party networks and the national legislative agenda, congressional office, social identity, and ideological proximity. With respect to contributing decisions, the book focuses on the three fundamental sources of the decision to contribute: the purposive, solidary, and material motives of contributors.
Specialized publics, such as Congressmen, physicians, or community leaders, are frequently subjects of opinion surveys. Their
good will may be jeopardized unless steps are taken to maintain their confidence and trust in opinion research, and not to
exhaust their time and patience. The author offers various suggestions, based in part on his own research experience, for
dealing with the situation.
Social Scientists rarely take full advantage of the information available in their statistical results. As a consequence, they miss opportunities to present quantities that are of greatest substantive interest for their research and express the appropriate degree of certainty about these quantities. In this article, we offer an approach, built on the technique of statistical simulation, to extract the currently overlooked information from any statistical method and to interpret and present it in a reader-friendly manner. Using this technique requires some expertise, which we try to provide herein, but its application should make the results of quantitative articles more informative and transparent. To illustrate our recommendations, we replicate the results of several published works, showing in each case how the authors' own conclusions can be expressed more sharply and informatively, and, without changing any data or statistical assumptions, how our approach reveals important new information about the research questions at hand. We also offer very easy-to-use Clarify software that implements our suggestions.
An important and pervasive view of campaign contributions is that they are given to promote access to successful candidates under circumstances when such access would not ordinarily be given. In this story, access is valuable as it offers groups the opportunity to influence legislative decisions through the provision of policy-relevant information. Under complete information regarding donors' policy preferences, I argue that this model predicts a negative relationship between contributions and the extent to which the groups' and the recipient legislators' preferences are similar. However, one of the more robust empirical findings in the literature is that this relationship is positive. Relaxing the informational assumption on donors' preferences, I reexamine the access story with a model in which campaign contributions can act as signals of policy preference and the (informational) value of access to any agent is endogenous.
This article makes three contributions to the debate about how PACs decide to allocate their money. First, it suggests that some of the controversy about the importance of member power to PAC contributions may result from weak measures of power. The concept of power used here is based upon information collected from extensive interviews with PAC officials, and the index that has been developed is a closer approximation of each PAC's evaluation of who has power. Second, interviews and statistical data establish that member power is important to almost all of the organizations investigated, along with candidate issue positions, electoral marginality, personal friendships between PAC officials and incumbents, and incumbent aggressiveness in pursuing PAC contributions. Third, the research has breadth, in that the decisions of 120 PACs affiliated with 10 organizations from 1975 to 1982 are examined.
Over the last two decades institutional critics have increasingly charged that moneyed interests dominate the legislative process in Congress. Systematic research on campaign contributions and members' floor voting, however, provides little supporting evidence. We develop a view of the member-donor relationship that questions the theoretical underpinnings of the vote-buying hypothesis itself and suggests two alternative claims: (1) the effects of group expenditures are more likely to appear in committee than on the floor; and (2) the behavior most likely to be affected is members' legislative involvement, not their votes. In order to test this account, we specify a model of committee participation and estimate it using data from three House committees. In contrast to the substantial literature on contributions and roll calls, our analysis provides solid support for the importance of moneyed interests in the legislative process. We also find evidence that members are more responsive to organized business interests within their districts than to unorganized voters even when voters have strong preferences and the issue at stake is salient. Such findings suggest several important implications for our understanding of political money, interest groups, and the representativeness of legislative deliberations.
Political scientists have pointed out that access is an important motivation for campaign contributions, but their evidence to date is based largely on case study observations, on the opinions of participants and observers, and on inferences from indirect quantitative evidence. This paper provides more direct quantitative evidence on the topic, using data from the Commission on Administrative Review of the House of Representatives in the 95th Congress. It uses tobit analysis to estimate the impact of PAC campaign contributions and several other independent variables, including indicators of a member's tenure, legislative position, and electoral security, on the number of minutes that members spent in their office with representatives of organized interest groups during a typical workweek. The results suggest, but do not prove, that money does indeed buy access.
Despite numerous analyses of the relationship between campaign contributions and the roll-call voting behavior of members of Congress, we still lack definitive answers to long-standing questions about whether contributions affect votes. Part of the reason for this is that it is methodologically difficult to account for members' predispositions to vote in favor of PACs' interests. This article seeks to advance our understanding of the relationship between campaign contributions and voting behavior by using a method for panel data that overcomes the problem of accounting for voting predispositions. This method enables us to account for individual specific effects, such as the predisposition to vote for or against a particular piece of legislation, which are too costly or impossible to measure. Applying this method, I find that contributions do not have consistent effects that would indicate that PACs are significantly biasing congressional decision making in their favor.
A variety of single equation and simultaneous equation models have been employed to test the hypothesis that interest group campaign contributions influence congressional voting. Although contributions exhibited the anticipated positive effect in all models, the simultaneous equations estimates generally indicated much lower significance levels for the contribution coefficients than did the single equation models. The lower significance levels are apparently attributable to a lack of precision of the simultaneous model estimates (indicated by large standard errors) as well as possible bias of the single equation models. It was also found that qualitative results from the more sophisticated simultaneous probit-Tobit models were quite similar to those obtained from 2SLS estimation of the linear probability model.
The overall results of the study are unavoidably ambiguous. Contributions did not show highly significant effects in the preferred simultaneous models, but the consistent sign pattern suggests that it would be inappropriate to conclude that contributions have no effects. Study of additional issues and interest groups may help to resolve some of ambiguity surrounding the contribution-voting relationship.
Public financing: Making it work. League of Women Voters
- E Daniel
Can the legislative campaign finance system be reformed
- M Jewell
- W Cassie
Campaign spending in state legislative races
- G Moncrief
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- S Salmore
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- E E Schattschneider
Expenditures and election results
- W Cassie
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First returns on a campaign finance reform experiment: Maine, Arizona, and full public funding. The National Institute on Money in State Politics
- S Sanchez
Today deadline to file as “clean” candidates
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The effects of campaign finance laws on state legislative elections. Paper presented at the State Politics and Policy Conference
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What does research on legislative campaign finance tell us about reform proposals? Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Southern Political Science Association
- M Jewell
Quality challengers to congressional incumbents: Can better candidates be found?
- L Maisel
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Those who give and those who watch want a new direction
- R Morin
- M Brossard