Campaign Finance Regulations and Public Policy

Despite a century of efforts to constrain money in American elections, there is little consensus on whether campaign finance regulations make any appreciable difference. Here we take advantage of a change in the campaign finance regulations of half of the U.S. states mandated by the Supreme Court’s...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The American political science review 2021-08, Vol.115 (3), p.1074-1081
Main Authors: GILENS, MARTIN, PATTERSON, SHAWN, HAINES, PAVIELLE
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Bans
Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act 2002-US
Campaign contributions
Campaigns
Citizens
Companies
Court Litigation
Election results
Elections
Expenditures
Government aid
Group Behavior
Ideology
Inferences
Interest groups
Labor unions
Legislators
Legislatures
Letter
Money
Policy making
Political campaigns
Political finance
Political parties
Political science
Public finance
Public policy
Regulation
State elections
State Policy
States
Success
Supreme Court decisions
Supreme courts
Tax rates
Welfare
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Summary:Despite a century of efforts to constrain money in American elections, there is little consensus on whether campaign finance regulations make any appreciable difference. Here we take advantage of a change in the campaign finance regulations of half of the U.S. states mandated by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. This exogenously imposed change in the regulation of independent expenditures provides an advance over the identification strategies used in most previous studies. Using a generalized synthetic control method, we find that after Citizens United, states that had previously banned independent corporate expenditures (and thus were “treated” by the decision) adopted more “corporate-friendly” policies on issues with broad effects on corporations’ welfare; we find no evidence of shifts on policies with little or no effect on corporate welfare. We conclude that even relatively narrow changes in campaign finance regulations can have a substantively meaningful influence on government policy making.
ISSN:0003-0554
1537-5943
DOI:10.1017/S0003055421000149