From the FEC to the Ballot Box: Voter Accountability for Campaign Finance Law Violations

DOI10.1177/1532673X18759641
Date01 September 2019
Published date01 September 2019
Subject MatterArticles
https://doi.org/10.1177/1532673X18759641
American Politics Research
2019, Vol. 47(5) 1000 –1035
© The Author(s) 2018
Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/1532673X18759641
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Article
From the FEC to the
Ballot Box: Voter
Accountability for
Campaign Finance Law
Violations
Ben Gaskins1, Ellen Seljan1, Todd Lochner1,
Katie Kowal1, Zane Dundon1, and Maya Gold1
Abstract
Scholarship suggests the Federal Election Commission lacks adequate
enforcement tools to deter those who would violate campaign finance laws.
But can and do voters hold political candidates accountable for violating
these laws? In this article, we employ two studies to empirically evaluate
these questions. The first examines the extent to which media cover
campaign finance violations, and how they do so. The second employs
an experimental approach to test the effects of such media coverage on
evaluations of political candidates, in particular whether knowledge of a
candidate’s violation of campaign finance laws erodes voter support. We
find that the media are more likely to cover campaign finance impropriety
for high-profile offices, when criminal action is alleged, and for most serious
violations. We also show that voters care about campaign violations, and
certain violations lower voter support similar to other types of political
scandal.
Keywords
campaign finance, scandal, Federal Election Commission, voting
1Lewis & Clark College, Portland, OR, USA
Corresponding Author:
Ben Gaskins, Lewis & Clark College, 0615 SW Palatine Hill Road, MSC 12, Portland,
OR 97219, USA.
Email: bgaskins@lclark.edu
759641APRXXX10.1177/1532673X18759641American Politics ResearchGaskins et al.
research-article2018
Gaskins et al. 1001
For many decades, political scientists have studied voter accountability in a
wide variety of contexts, attempting to determine the manner and extent to
which voters punish legislators for economic conditions (Ashworth, 2012;
Kiewiet & Rivers, 1984), noneconomic policy outcomes (Berry & Howell,
2007), and scandal (Ahuja et al., 1994; Ferraz & Finan, 2011; Vivyan,
Wagner, & Tarlov, 2012). In this article, we seek to determine whether voters
hold candidates accountable for violating federal campaign finance law. This
research informs two important issues. First, we contribute to the robust lit-
erature on voter accountability, particularly as it relates to the effect of politi-
cal scandal on voter support. Second, almost all observers of the Federal
Election Commission (FEC) argue that it lacks the enforcement mechanisms
to deter potential wrongdoers; understanding the extent to which voters
themselves may hold lawbreakers accountable will shed light on the efficacy
of present regulatory efforts.
This article combines two studies to test the potential for voter account-
ability for campaign finance violations. The first study examines whether and
how the media cover these violations. We analyze over 1,000 newspaper
reports of campaign finance impropriety between 2010 and 2014, examining
media choice of who, what, and when scandal coverage occurs. The second
study uses an experimental methodology to test the effects of such media cov-
erage on evaluations of political candidates. Using an online survey, we gauge
responses to fictional reports of campaign finance scandal, manipulating the
type and magnitude of the scandal as well as other attributes. We find that the
media are more likely to cover campaign finance impropriety in more high-
profile cases and when the violation is more severe. Second, we show that
voters do hold candidates accountable for some types of campaign finance
violations—especially personal use of campaign funds—and lower their vote
likelihood by at least as much or more as other types of scandals analyzed in
previous research, namely, tax evasion and moral impropriety. However, some
limitations impede the potential for voter accountability: The press often cov-
ers allegations of wrongdoing without reporting on the ultimate disposition of
the case, and voters respond to mere allegations as strongly as they do convic-
tions. Partisanship also heavily mediates voter evaluations.
Voter Accountability, Political Scandal, and
Campaign Finance Enforcement
The agency relationship between legislators and voters works in representa-
tive democracies only if elections ensure some measure of accountability for
elected officials (Besley & Prat, 2006). It is unsurprising, then, that signifi-
cant social science research has been devoted to the concept of retrospective
1002 American Politics Research 47(5)
voting as a means of ensuring such accountability. This literature can be
broadly classified into three categories: sanctioning models that view voters
using their power to punish agency loss, selection models in which voters
look at a legislator’s past behavior to make predictions about future conduct,
and psychological models that focus on the degree to which cognitive and
emotional biases may undermine the rational choice assumptions of the two
other models (Healy & Malhotra, 2013). Originally, the research focused on
the relationship between economic performance and voter support
(Ashworth, 2012; Fiorina, 1981; Kiewiet & Rivers, 1984), with some
researchers employing a “pocketbook” metric of individual economic secu-
rity to mixed results (Fiorina, 1978; Tufte, 1978) while others used a socio-
tropic perspective comparing incumbent performance to national economic
trends (Kinder & Kiewiet, 1979, 1981). Still others focused on voter
accountability using noneconomic metrics such as the relationship between
school test scores and voter accountability (Berry & Howell, 2007). We need
not recount the findings of this voluminous literature except to note that it
found retrospective voting common at the national and state levels (Berry &
Howell, 2007).
In addition to responding to economic trends and discrete policies, voters
may also withhold support from elected officials who have been accused or
convicted of engaging in scandalous or illegal behavior. For example, the
U.S. House bank scandal in the early 1990s reduced voter support of incum-
bents by roughly 5% (Dimock & Jacobson, 1995) and also resulted in strate-
gic retirements (Ahuja et al., 1994). Peters and Welch (1980) found that
political scandal on the whole can reduce vote share by 11%. Comparative
studies of the British Parliament (Vivyan et al., 2012), the Italian legislature
(Chang, Golden, & Hill, 2010), and local Brazilian governments (Ferraz &
Finan, 2011) also demonstrate that voters may hold elected officials account-
able for scandalous behavior. One may debate whether voters exact greater
electoral retribution for financial scandals or “moral” scandals (Carlson,
Ganiel, & Hyde, 2000; Funk, 1996; Peters & Welch, 1980; Welch & Hibbing,
1997), though voters seem especially likely to punish scandals involving
abuse of power (Doherty, Dowling, & Miller, 2011).
The operative word, however, is “may.” The ability and willingness of
voters to hold elected officials accountable for undesirable policy outcomes
or scandalous wrongdoing are limited by at least three factors: information,
partisanship, and inherent cognitive bias. First, information is crucial in ret-
rospective voting, but gathering information is costly and voters often have
low levels of political information (Delli Carpini & Keeter, 1996; Ferejohn,
1990). Consequently, robust media coverage of legislators facilitates voter
accountability, priming their evaluations of candidates (Iyengar & Kinder,

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