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Expenditure
The Lonely Death of Public Campaign Financing
Richard M. Esenberg
January 2010
Category: Expenditure, Jurisprudence & Litigation, Taxpayer Financed Campaigns
Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy
This Article argues that the game of reform, having been the victim of two major campaign finance decisions of the Roberts Court, is over. The Supreme Court's decision in Davis v. FEC will prove to be fatal to most, if not all, asymmetrical public financing schemes, and the Court's treatment of expenditures for issue advocacy announced in FEC v. Wisconsin Right to Life (WRTL II) will leave most forms of independent expenditures beyond effective limitation. The combination may render public financing systems effectively futile. But the principles underlying WRTL II and Davis have a longstanding pedigree in that jurisprudence. Ultimately, expenditures differ from contributions. It is not the role of the state to level the political playing field. Recognizing the implication of these principles may remind us that democracy may be better served by competition than by control.
Anatomy of a Failed Idea
Mike Nichols
November 2009
Category: Expenditure, Taxpayer Financed Campaigns
Wisconsin Interest Vol. 18, No. 3
This article analyzes the experiment with taxpayer financed elections in Wisconsin. Initially conceived as a way of ensuring that anyone could run for election, data from past elections proves that contrary to its intent, the program is achieving the opposite results. In his study, Mike Nichols points out the program's failures and explains its shortcomings. Ultimately, the author demonstrates the failure of Wisconsin's experiment with taxpayer-financed campaigns.
Does Money Buy Elections? The Impact of Spending on U.S. Congressional Campaigns
Americans for Campaign Reform
January 2008
Category: Expenditure
Policy Paper No. PB08-01
This study examines challenger, incumbent and open-seat spending in congressional races. It addresses the need for sufficient campaign funds early on, incumbent advantages, and the diminishing returns of campaign spending after reaching a certain threshold. The paper concludes that while the need for money is important to all candidates, it is especially so for challengers and notes that reforms aimed at limiting candidate spending or restricting access to funds are like to have an adverse effect on challengers, and may even harden the incumbency advantage to the detriment of competition.
Campaign Finance Red Tape: Strangling Free Speech & Political Debate
Jeffrey Milyo
October 2007
Category: Contributions & Limits, Disclosure, Expenditure
Institute for Justice
The Benefits of Campaign Spending
John J. Coleman
September 2003
Category: Expenditure
Cato Briefing Paper no. 84
Critics of American politics often say that spending on electoral campaigns harms our democracy and charge that the money goes for cynical, negative, and misleading advertisements that alienate the public from politics and elections. However, studies indicate that campaign spending does not diminish trust, efficacy, and involvement. Moreover, spending increases public knowledge of the candidates, across essentially all groups in the population. This paper explores the idea that getting more money into campaigns should, on the whole, be beneficial to American democracy.
The Distribution of Campaign Spending Benefits across Groups
John J. Coleman
August 2001
Category: Expenditure
The Journal of Politics
Coleman and Manna argue that campaign spending boosts the quality of democracy by increasing citizen knowledge about and affect toward candidates. If politically and socially advantaged groups disproportionately capture these knowledge benefits, however, then campaign spending merely perpetuates political inequality. Examining challenger and incumbent spending in 1996, I estimate the distribution of campaign spending benefits and find that these benefits are distributed broadly across advantaged and disadvantaged groups. In this regard, campaign spending is a democratizing force.
Congressional Campaign Spending and the Quality of Democracy
John J. Coleman
August 2000
Category: Expenditure
The Journal of Politics
Nearly all research on campaign finance overlooks important intermediaries between candidate spending and electoral outcomes. We consider the effects of campaign spending on a variety of factors important to the health of any democracy and political community: trust, efficacy, involvement, attention, knowledge, and affect. Our analysis of the 1994 and 1996 U.S. House elections shows that the effects of campaign spending lie more on the side of democratic boon than democratic bane. Campaign spending increases knowledge of and affect toward the candidates, improves the public's ability to place candidates on ideology and issue scales, and encourages certainty about those placements. Spending neither enhances nor erodes trust and efficacy in politics or attention and interest in campaigns. We conclude that campaign spending contributes to key aspects of democracy such as knowledge and affect, while not damaging public trust or involvement.
Political Money and Freedom of Speech
Kathleen M. Sullivan
January 1997
Category: Contributions & Limits, Expenditure, Jurisprudence & Litigation
University of California, Davis Law Review 663-90 (1997)
This study challenges the orthodoxy that political money must be limited. The author first outlines the current law of political money and proposals for reform, and then critically examines reformers' arguments by examining the political and constitutional theories that refute them. She concludes by noting that the best way to resolve the anomalies in the current campaign finance landscape may be to eliminate contribution limits entirely.
Campaign Activities and State Election Outcomes
Susan E. Howell
December 1982
Category: Contributions & Limits, Expenditure, Taxpayer Financed Campaigns
Political Behavior, Vol. 4., No. 4
This research first clusters campaign activities in Louisiana state legislative elections into five clusters: direct attempts to persuade voters, obtaining the support of other elites, attempts to increase turnout, seeking endorsements from other political officials, and fund raising. Indices created from these clusters are then compared to the situational factors of incumbency and competition as predictors of election outcomes. Data are surveys of candidates for the Louisiana legislature in which they were asked about the conduct of their campaigns and their relative emphasis on various activities. Incumbency was by far the best predictor of what percentage of the vote a candidate obtained, and in open seat contests, expenditures and competition best predicted outcome. Overall, the campaign activities had very little relationship to outcome when controlling for situational factors. Variations occurred between the House and Senate races with implications for challengers'' strategies and campaign financing.
