Do Campaign Donors Influence Polarization? Evidence from Public Financing in the American States

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lsq.12108
• Published date: 01 February 2016
• Author: Justin H. Kirkland,Jeffrey J. Harden
• Date: 01 February 2016

JEFFREY J. HARDEN

University of Colorado Boulder

JUSTIN H. KIRKLAND

University of Houston

Do Campaign Donors Influence

Polarization? Evidence from

Public Financing in the

American States

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 legis-

latures. 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.

In its controversial Buckley v. Valeo decision in 1976, the US

Supreme Court ruled that money constitutes protected political speech

under certain circumstances. By striking down provisions of the Federal

Election Campaign Act of 1971—which limited campaign and independ-

ent expenditures—Buckley v. Valeo has become a judicial cornerstone

for several subsequent decisions that have eliminated efforts to dampen

the effects of money in elections (e.g., Davis v. Federal Election Com-

mission [2008], Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission [2010],

and Arizona Free Enterprise Club’s Freedom Club PAC v. Bennett

[2011]). In all of these instances, the Supreme Court held that the act of

donating money is a protected form of speech and that using public funds

to equalize spending across candidates dilutes the political speech of

those providing private donations. That is, in the Court’s view, donating

to campaigns is a form of political participation that is valuable to the

public precisely because it can inf‌luence public off‌icials’ behavior. The

Court’s logic leads to a critical question for scholars of representation: do

campaign donations actually alter the behavior of elected off‌icials?

LEGISLATIVE STUDIES QUARTERLY, 41, 1, February 2016 119

DOI: 10.1111/lsq.12108

V

C2016 Washington University in St. Louis

By stating that campaign donations are a form of protected speech,

the Court’s recent decisions indicate that the answer to this question is

“yes.” Others have made similar observations, with a particular emphasis

on whether campaign contributions inf‌luence the ideological extremity

of legislators’ voting behavior. Many observers state that private donors

may be ideologically motivated and/or play a role in driving polarization

in Congress and state legislatures, including academic researchers (e.g.,

Hall 2014; La Raja and Wiltse 2012; McCarty 2014; but see Masket and

Miller 2015; Wawro 2001), editorial columnists (Klein 2013; Krugman

2002), and advocacy groups (Common Cause 2014). Even President

Obama, in response to the Citizens United case, stated that “ideological

extremists who have a big bankroll...can entirely skew our politics”

(Blumenthal 2013). However, empirically isolating the causal effect of

campaign donations on ideological extremity has proven diff‌icult

because of the myriad of other factors that contribute to polarization as

well as the possibility that the causal arrow may actually point in the

opposite direction (McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal 2006).

In this research, we consider whether the claim that private donors

facilitate legislative polarization stands up to empirical scrutiny by exam-

ining the effect of eliminating their donations. We use novel evidence

and causal inference methods to estimate the impact of publicly f‌inanced

campaigns on ideological extremity at the individual legislator level

(roll-call voting) and on legislative party polarization. We f‌irst develop a

series of theoretical expectations regarding the inf‌luence of donations—

and by extension, removing them via public funding—on legislators’

voting behavior. We posit that the introduction of public f‌inancing may

either moderate, polarize, or exert negligible effects on the ideological

extremity of votes in committee and at roll call. We then test these pre-

dictions in two analyses from the American states.

First, we leverage a natural experiment in public f‌inancing pro-

vided by the New Jersey Fair and Clean Elections Pilot Project.The

program instituted public f‌inancing in state legislative elections for a

subset of the New Jersey Assembly in 2005 and 2007. While the pro-

gram did not produce a large sample of data, it did provide a rare and

valuable opportunity to observe the behavior of legislators in the same

chamber under different electoral rules. We utilize synthetic case control

to generate predictions of what the publicly f‌inanced legislators’ voting

behavior would have looked like had they not used public funds. We

then compare those predictions to the legislators’ actual voting behavior

after public f‌inancing. We f‌ind virtually no ideological adaptation by

individual legislators to the advent of publicly f‌inanced legislative elec-

tions. We then extend this individual-level analysis to a similar design in

120 Jeffrey J. Harden and Justin H. Kirkland

which we examine the entire state legislatures in Arizona and Maine

before and after public f‌inancing. Our results again indicate that the

effect of publicly f‌inanced elections on legislative behavior is substan-

tively negligible.

Overall, we conclude that there is strong evidence that legislators

do not respond to the source of campaign funding through the ideologi-

cal extremity of their voting behavior. This conclusion holds at both the

committee and f‌loor vote stages of the legislative process. Campaign

donations may represent some form of political participation or speech,

but that speech appears largely ineffective in inf‌luencing votes in state

legislatures. In short, our evidence runs counter to the conventional wis-

dom cited above. While public f‌inancing programs may be normatively

benef‌icial for increasing electoral competition and/or reducing corrup-

tion in government, they do not appear to alter the voting behavior of

legislators.

Campaign Finance and the Role of Money in Politics

The role of money in politics has long been a topic of considerable

scholarly and normative interest. From Schattschneider (1960) to recent

work on economic and political inequality (e.g., Bartels 2008; Gilens

2012), scholars have made the case that money is a necessary (though

not always suff‌icient) prerequisite for political inf‌luence. For example,

money impacts the rate at which citizens participate in politics

(Schlozman, Verba, and Brady 2012), the emergence of challengers to

legislative off‌ice (Hogan 2001), interest groups’ strategies for inf‌luenc-

ing election outcomes (Hogan 2005), direct democracy campaigns

(Stratmann 2006), and other political outcomes. There is also some

evidence that money contributed to campaigns inf‌luences legislative

behavior, though this contention is not without its detractors (cf.

Ansolabehere, de Figueiredo, and Snyder 2003; La Raja 2008;

Stratmann 2005; Wawro 2001). Overall, the question of whether money

is too inf‌luential in American politics has produced considerable debate

in recent decades.

A subset of this literature looks to the American states to under-

stand the role of various institutions that govern the f‌inancing of election

campaigns. For example, this work examines whether limits on cam-

paign donations inf‌luence legislative behavior as well as citizen

perceptions of politics. Hamm and Hogan (2008) f‌ind that low contribu-

tion limits for legislative campaigns increase the probability of a

challenger emerging to test an incumbent. Stratmann and Aparicio-

Castillo (2006) show that campaign f‌inance restrictions contribute to

121Do Campaign Donors Influence Polarization?