Public Financing of Elections After Citizens United and Arizona Free Enterprise

Based on political contribution records from six Midwestern states, compares the projected impact of providing small-donor public matching funds to that of lowering contribution limits on election participation by a diverse mix of donors

Donor Diversity through Public Matching Funds

New York State is considering a system of public campaign financing for state elections similar to the one New York City uses for municipal elections. In that system, the city puts up six dollars in public matching funds for each of the first $175 that a city resident contributes to a candidate participating in the voluntary program.One of the key purposes of the city's matching fund program is to strengthen the connections between public officials and their constituents by bringing more small donors into the process and making them more important to the candidates' campaigns. A previous paper by the Campaign Finance Institute showed that matching funds heighten the number and role of small donors in city elections and would be likely to do the same at the state level.This joint study by the Brennan Center for Justice and the Campaign Finance Institute tests whether these powerful but anecdotal claims are supported by the available evidence from the most recent state and municipal elections. To do so, we compared donors to candidates in the City Council elections of 2009, where there was a public financing program, to the donors to candidates in the State Assembly elections of 2010, where there was no such program. We compared the City Council and State Assembly races because those electoral districts are similar in size and because doing so allowed us to look at the giving patterns of the same city residents in different elections

Assessing Group Incentives, Independent Spending, and Campaign Finance Law by Comparing the States

Independent expenditures (IEs) in U.S. elections have increased substantially at nearly all levels of government over the past decade, but judicial decisions are only a partial explanation for this growth. Using a descriptive difference-in-differences approach, we show that the growth has been uneven across types of elections and spenders under different legal regimes. This finding highlights the importance of disaggregating spenders, elections, and laws in order to explain IEs more fully. This article analyzes IEs in state gubernatorial and legislative elections from 2006 through 2018 across states with differing campaign finance laws and political contexts. It uses an original and detailed classification of spenders, along with data on IEs from the National Institute on Money in Politics, the Campaign Finance Institute's historical database of state campaign finance laws, and other sources. The legal variations on which the article focuses are the various states' laws limiting contributions to candidates and political parties. It concentrates on these because of an oft-stated expectation that removing contribution limits will sharply reduce the level of IEs. In addition to contribution limits, we also assess partisan competition as a primary explanation for the level of IEs in various states, and across the sectors of spenders. We find, using multi-variate analysis, that increased partisan competition (at both the candidate level and chamber level) is in most cases a significant driver of IEs. In contrast, the associations between IEs and contribution limits are inconsistent and generally not significant. Importantly for ongoing policy debates, ideological and issue-driven spending appears to have weak association (or none) with contribution limits. Therefore, if the recent increase in IEs is in fact a normative problem, the solution may be more elusive than once thought

A Neo-Madisonian Perspective on Campaign Finance Reform, Institutions, Pluralism, and Small Donors

This working paper steps away from the speech-and-corruption debates that have dominated campaign finance conversations. Instead, it offers a proposal that fits well within current constitutional law while being more effective at addressing systemic inequality than alternatives that require a constitutional amendment. Like Madison in The Federalist, the article stresses the importance of looking at proposals from a perspective that seriously weighs their effects on institutional performance. The first major section of the paper develops the Federalists’ argument, and its flaws, while the second explains how current fundraising practices undermine legislative deliberation. The third section argues for an approach that would address current inequalities, correcting the main defect of Madisonian pluralism by bringing more diverse voices into the process while protecting against institutional harm. The approach would use generous small-donor matching funds, or vouchers, but with public funds used only to support within-district contributions.</jats:p