Mind the (Participation) Gap: Vouchers, Voting, and Visibility

• Author: Abby K. Wood,Christopher S. Elmendorf,Douglas M. Spencer,Nicholas G. Napolio
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/1532673X211067256
• Published date: 01 September 2022
• Date: 01 September 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

American Politics Research

2022, Vol. 50(5) 623–642

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/1532673X211067256

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Mind the (Participation) Gap: Vouchers,

Voting, and Visibility

Abby K. Wood

1

, Christopher S. Elmendorf

2

, Douglas M. Spencer

3

,

and Nicholas G. Napolio

4



Abstract

This study exploits the introduction of a new type of public financing of elections—campaign finance vouchers—to estimate the

effects of neighborhood-level political cross-pressure on citizens’decisions to participate in low-cost political activities which

vary in their publicness: voting (private) and vouchering (public). Does proximity to ideologically divergent neighbors affect

one’s use of publicly disclosed campaign finance vouchers? We find that cross-pressured individuals are slightly more likely to use

a campaign finance voucher than similarly situated individuals who are ideologically typical for their precinct. We also find

evidence that precinct-level cross-pressure does not drive voucher users to shade their voucher donations toward candidates

who are ideologically closer the precinct mean. While our study is limited to a relatively liberal city (Seattle), our results

replicated across two election cycles in that city, and our methods can easily be extended to future elections. Finally, our findings

raise questions about the empirical assumptions that have shaped the development of campaign finance jurisprudence since

1976.

Keywords

Campaign finance, disclosure, vouchers, political cross-pressure, matching

Introduction

Most campaign finance regimes in the United States require

public disclosure of private contributions to candidates in

excess of a modest threshold ($200 in federal elections, less in

many state and local elections). Critics of mandatory dis-

closure argue that it chills individuals from exercising their

First Amendment right to speak and associate through the

contribution of money to candidates, and that this chilling

effect is particularly likely to occur among political minor-

ities. Disclosure is said to muffle the voices of people who

would otherwise contribute to the marketplace of ideas. In

recognition of this risk, the U.S. Supreme Court requires

disclosure exemptions for donors to minor parties and to

independent candidates when there is a demonstrable risk of

harassment. Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U.S. 1, 64–74 (1976).

Whether disclosure chills political participation is an

empirical question (Wood, 2018). The relationship between

disclosure and participation is difficult to untangle because no

extant disclosure regime was randomly assigned or otherwise

rolled out in a fashion that would allow researchers to isolate

plausibly comparable “treatment”and “control”groups. Nor

can researchers make headway on the question using a

discontinuity design because donations below disclosure

thresholds are not observed. In this study, we attempt to shed

some new light on this old and difficult question by

leveraging an innovative local campaign financing program.

Although small-dollar public funding programs have been

advocated for decades (see, e.g., Ackerman & Ayres, 2002;

de Figueiredo & Garrett, 2005;Foley, 1994;Hasen, 1996;

Overton, 2004), the first publicly funded system of campaign

finance vouchers was adopted only recently, by the city of

Seattle, Washington. Each registered voter receives four $25

vouchers, which may be assigned to candidates running for

local office. The vouchers are accompanied by information

about disclosure of the voucher contributions (Appendix A).

Candidates who wish to redeem vouchers agree to various

restrictions on private fundraising and demonstrate their

viability by raising small private donations. Research con-

current with ours has shown that Seattle’s voucher program

expanded the campaign finance donor pool (McCabe &

Heerwig, 2018), though not yet to the extent that

1

University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

2

University of California, Davis, Davis, CA, USA

3

University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA

4

University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

Corresponding Author:

Abby K. Wood, University of Southern California Gould School of Law, 699

Exposition Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90089-0001, USA.

Email: awood@law.usc.edu

advocates have promised.

1

Because all voucher contributions

are publicly disclosed, Seattle’s program allows us to analyze

the effects of political cross-pressure on the decision to assign

campaign finance vouchers.

Important to our research design, Seattle’s voucher

program equalizes the personal financial costs of voting

and contributing money (up to the voucher amount). Both

votes and vouchers can be assigned by mail or by waiting

in line, and without payment of a fee. Yet,the privacy costs

of voting and vouchering are very different. Seattle does

not record, let alone release, information about which

candidate received the vote of which voter, whereas

vouchering is public in exactly this way. Because voting

and vouchering both provide support to the candidate on

the receiving end, and because both forms of support can

be provided at negligible cost to the voter, we would

expect eligible individuals to make the same participate-

or-abstain decision with respect to both political re-

sources—if voting and vouchering were equally public, if

the choice sets were identical, and if voters were equally

knowledgeable about both programs. See Tabl e 1.How-

ever, the latter two conditions were not satisfied in the

2017 Seattle election. The voucher program was brand

new (so citizens probably knew less about it than they

knew about voting), and candidates in the highest profile

race on the ballot (mayor) were not eligible to receive

vouchers. Moreover, spending limits and limited appro-

priations for the voucher program may have discouraged

candidates from mobilizing voucher contributions with

the same gusto that they mobilize votes.

2

Due to some

combination of these factors, we observe a large baseline

participation gap. The citywide rate of participation by

vouchering was approximately 4.5% in 2017 (up from 1 to

2% in the fully private system), and the voter turnout rate

was 63%.

Our goal in this paper is to assess whether variations in the

participation gap may be explained by neighborhood-levelcross-

pressure. Our strategy is to test whether voucher use varies

systematically between individuals who are ideologically similar

to their neighbors and individuals who are local political outliers,

relative to baseline rates of turnout. Put differently, we estimate

the treatment effect of neighborhood ideological cross pressure

on registered voters’private (votes) and public (vouchers) po-

litical participation decisions.

We use two matching strategies to estimate the effect of

neighborhood cross-pressure on voting and vouchering. In the

first analysis, registered voters in the treatment group (distant

from their neighborhood’s ideological mean) and registered

voters in the control group (similar to their ne igh bor hoo d’s

ideological mean) are matched on ideology and on a

measure of their propensity to participate in politics. For

the second analysis, which was not pre-registered, we do

not match on ideology, in effect treating ideologically

moderate Seattleites as counterfactuals for extremists

(conditional on their propensity to participate in politics).

We added the second design, which rests on much stronger

assumptions, after discovering that there is little variance

in the mean ideology of neighborhoods in Seattle. This

means that the treatment dose in our pre-registered design

is very small—the registered voters classified as distant

from their neighborhood mean are in reality fairly close to

it, just not as close as those who are classified as typical.

Results from both designs are similar and do not support the

hypothesis that neighborhood-level cross-pressure causes local

political outliers to participate less in public (vouchering) relative

to private (voting) political activity. The observed effects of

neighborhood-level dissonance on voting and vouchering are

both very small and, if anything, local political outliers are less

likelytovotebutmore likely to voucher than otherwise similar

registered voters who are not local outliers. This cuts against the

conventional wisdom about the supposed chilling effect of

disclosure. We replicated our design on data from the 2019

election and find similar results for vouchering among politically

cross-pressured voters, when compared to population matches

who were not cross-pressured.

Wealso estimate the effect of neighborhood cross-pressure on

donors’choice of voucher recipients. Among pairs of voters

matched on ideology and propensity to participate, we find that

those who are neighborhood cross-pressured are less likely to

give to candidates whose ideology is similar to the donor’sown

ideology. Oddly, though, the vouchers assigned by these cross-

pressured voters are not more likely to go to candidates who are

close to the ideological mean of their neighborhood, relative to

the vouchers assigned by the matched-pair voter in the control

group. Thus, while cross-pressure appears to have some effect on

the choice of whom to contribute, it is not the social-conformity

(homophily) effect we hypothesize.

Our study is limited to a relatively liberal city (Seattle), and

it remains to be seen whether our findings will generalize to

other jurisdictions. But because we find no evidence of

chilling or neighborhood-conformity effects, our results

suggest that courts should be cautious about imposing an

anonymity requirement on voucher programs.

3

Cross-Pressure, Ideology, and Campaign

Finance Participation

Some people are embedded in ideologically congenial social

networks. Other people are political minorities within their

Table 1. Comparison of Different Modes of Political Participation.

Costly Free

Public Private campaign Vouchers

Donations

Private Voting

Note. Campaign finance vouchers allow us to compare political participation

in two free activities, one of which is public (voucher donation) and one of

which is private (voting).

624 American Politics Research 50(5)