State Campaign Finance Laws and the Equality of Political Representation

Abstract

Laws that regulate the financing of campaigns are one attempt to attenuate the role of money in politics in hopes that citizens' opinions will receive more equal consideration when elected officials make policy decisions. Do states with stricter campaign finance laws actually display more egalitarian patterns of representation? Using public opinion measures from the National Annenberg Election Surveys and data on state policies, I first demonstrate that state policy decisions are consistently more proximate to the opinions of citizens with higher incomes. I then evaluate the relationship between the strictness of state campaign finance laws and political equality and find evidence that states with more stringent campaign finance disclosure requirements weigh citizens' opinions more equally in the policymaking process. However, I find no statistical relationship between the strictness of contribution limits or the presence of a public financing system and the equality of political representation.

Do the Affluent Override Average Americans? Measuring Policy Disagreement and Unequal Influence

“…This methodological approach could also be used in longitudinal analyses to investigate how the extent of unequal influence may vary over time, and whether political and macroeconomic conditions help explain this variation. Investigating the conditions under which middle‐ or low‐income Americans do wield a degree of political influence in particular states (see Flavin, 2014, 2015a, 2015b; Rigby and Wright, 2011, 2013) is also a fertile area for future research.…”

“…Other studies have found that federal representatives’ voting behavior is more closely related to the ideological preferences of the affluent than to those of the less affluent (e.g., Hayes, 2013). Additional evidence of unequal democracy based on constituents’ ideological preferences has been found in state legislatures (Flavin, 2012b, 2014, 2015a, 2015b; Rigby and Wright, 2011) and state party platforms (Rigby and Wright, 2013).…”

“…The unequal responsiveness finding has motivated additional research into potential economic, political, and policy factors that might explain variation in the extent of unequal responsiveness across states, across time, across policy domains, and across party lines. This research has investigated party control, state inequality and poverty levels, voter turnout, constituent and representative party affiliation, campaign finance laws, and ballot initiatives as potential explanations for this variation (Flavin, 2012a, 2012b, 2014, 2015a, 2015b; Lax, Phillips, and Zelizer, 2019; Maks‐Solomon and Rigby, 2019; Rigby and Wright, 2011, 2013).…”

Political Equality in the American States

“…In a series of recent studies, the author of this review essay takes advantage of the sizable variation in laws and institutions across the states to examine that question and arrives at three main conclusions about what might be done to promote more equal government responsiveness to public opinion. First, states with more stringent campaign finance disclosure requirements (that mandate campaigns carefully report the source and amount of political donations) appear to dampen the effects of campaign contributions from wealthier citizens and business interests and, accordingly, have more equal patterns of political representation (Flavin 2014). Moreover, when evaluated over time, states with stricter campaign finance laws in general tend to spend more on public assistance programs that are strongly supported by citizens with lower incomes (Flavin 2015a).…”

Affluence and Congruence: Unequal Representation around the World

“…There are reasons to be skeptical that representation around the world is as unequal as some U.S. scholars suggest. Most of them attribute it to the outsize influence of money in American politics (e.g., Bartels 2008;Flavin 2014;Gilens 2012). If this is true, then we should expect less inequality in other contexts, where the role of money in politics is typically more circumscribed.…”