Does public campaign financing improve legislative representation?
This paper examines US state public financing programs (Arizona, Connecticut, Maine) through causal analysis. Advocates claim these systems reduce reliance on wealthy donors and enhance representation of constituent views. We challenge this assumption.
Our findings suggest replacing private donations with public funds creates unintended consequences. Using multiple identification strategies across three states, we discover that candidates receiving exclusive public campaign financing tend to adopt more extreme positions than privately funded candidates.
These results offer new insights into electoral reform debates. They demonstrate potential downsides of substituting private money for taxpayer-funded political campaigns: replacing donors can inadvertently expand the candidate marketplace and push representation further from constituent centrism, harming substantive representation despite good intentions.
Furthermore, this research advances institutional analysis by providing evidence on how changing campaign finance structures influences candidate positioning in specific US contexts.
| Public Money Talks Too: How Public Campaign Financing Degrades Representation was authored by Mitchell Kilborn and Arjun Vishwanath. It was published by Wiley in AJPS in 2022. |
