[EL] Efficacy of Campaign Finance Reform

[Todd Lochner]

How are you defining effective?  Are you asking:


1.  Do campaign finance regulations result in decreased corruption or its
appearance?


2.  Do campaign finance regulations decrease the amount of money in
politics?


3.  Do campaign finance regulations help to equalize the electoral playing
field?


The difficulty with such formulations is that if we contest the normative
goal, we may be less likely to agree whether a law is “effective” in
accomplishing that goal.


A less ambitious, but perhaps more fruitful way of engaging the question is
to consider what qualities most observers impute to “effective regulations”
more generally:  Can they be enforced in a timely fashion?  Can they be
enforced without partisan bias?  Are there systematic pathologies in the
enforcement process, such as a tendency to focus on minor technical
violations (filing a day late) rather than more purposeful or fraudulent
types of behavior (contributions in the name of another)?   Are different
types of agency structures better than others at accomplishing these goals?
Even these types of questions admit ambiguity of course—in some cases
filing a day late may have a more negative impact than hiding a $10
contribution in another person’s name—but their more focused nature makes
empirical analysis somewhat easier.


For example, my colleague Ellen Seljan and I recently studied the effect of
E-filing and E-disclosure on campaign finance enforcement in Oregon.  We
hypothesized that because E-disclosure makes it easier for political
opponents to monitor transactions, and because these “third-party”
complaints usually skew towards more obvious and trivial infractions, this
new technology would undermine the ability of the agency to pursue more
serious offenses.   We were proven wrong.  These changes, coupled with a
mandatory declination policy of nonserious offenses (defined as those whose
penalties would be less than $50) actually facilitated the agency’s ability
to purse more serious offenders.  In that sense, the Oregon approach is
effective.  That said, we question whether these results would hold in
states that have contribution-limitation regimes rather than Oregon’s
disclosure-only approach.  We presently are working on projects addressing
questions such as whether different types of agency structures correspond
to differences in perceived efficacy and equity (i.e. partisan bias)
amongst regulated entities (incumbents, losing challengers, contributors,
etc.), and whether citizens are likely to change their votes given
knowledge of a candidate’s violation of campaign finance law.


Asking whether campaign finance regulations can be effectively enforced may
not be what you meant when you asked whether campaign finance laws can be
effective.   But I doubt many people would argue that you can have the
latter, however one defines it, without the former.


Regards,

Todd

On Tue, Oct 27, 2015 at 3:04 PM, Steven John Mulroy (smulroy) <
smulroy at memphis.edu> wrote:

> Many of my election law students are of the view that all campaign finance
> reform efforts are doomed, that money always has been and always will be
> the determinant factor in politics.  I think this view may color their
> opinion of the value of learning about the law of campaign finance.
>
>
>
> I wonder if any of you can refer me to any studies, articles, or data
> suggesting that campaign finance reforms (even ones subsequently
> invalidated by the Court) can be effective?
>
>
>
> Steven Mulroy
>
> Professor of Law
>
> Associate Dean for Academic Affairs
>
> University of Memphis
>
> Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law
>
> 1 North Front Street
>
> Memphis, TN 38103
>
> 901.678.4494 office
>
> View some of my research on my SSRN Author page:
> http://ssrn.com/author=114356
>
> [image: memphis law logo]
>
>
>
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-- 
Todd Lochner, Ph.D., J.D.
Chair of the Department of Political Science
Associate Professor of Political Science
Lewis & Clark College
tlochner at lclark.edu
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