Allocating Unlimited Money: What Explains Super PAC Spending in Congressional Elections?

How do Super PACs allocate their resources? The question is both timely and relevant, particularly as we reflect on the ten-year anniversary of the Citizens United ruling. Super PACs now outspend – sometimes by huge margins, as in the 2016 presidential election – all other groups’ independent expenditures including those of parties, unions, and 501(c) organizations. The issue is especially important in congressional politics, where Super PACs have an opportunity to shape the institution every two years through congressional elections. Utilizing outside spending data from the Center for Responsive Politics, we analyze four U.S. House election cycles since the Supreme Court’s landmark 2010 Citizens United ruling (2012–2018). The likelihood that Super PACs invest in a race is strongly determined by the electoral context, even after controlling for the legislative influence of the incumbent member of Congress.

Campaign Finance Regulations and Public Policy

Despite a century of efforts to constrain money in American elections, there is little consensus on whether campaign finance regulations make any appreciable difference. Here we take advantage of a change in the campaign finance regulations of half of the U.S. states mandated by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. This exogenously imposed change in the regulation of independent expenditures provides an advance over the identification strategies used in most previous studies. Using a generalized synthetic control method, we find that after Citizens United, states that had previously banned independent corporate expenditures (and thus were “treated” by the decision) adopted more “corporate-friendly” policies on issues with broad effects on corporations’ welfare; we find no evidence of shifts on policies with little or no effect on corporate welfare. We conclude that even relatively narrow changes in campaign finance regulations can have a substantively meaningful influence on government policy making.

Do Campaign Finance Reforms Insulate Incumbents from Competition? New Evidence from State Legislative Elections

Variations in state campaign finance regulations across states and over time provide an opportunity to test the effects of reforms on the electoral success of incumbent state legislators. We use the most recent state legislative election returns dataset to test whether state campaign finance reforms help or hinder incumbents. Our analysis of nearly 66,000 contests in 33 years reveals that campaign contribution limits and partial public financing have little impact on incumbent reelection prospects. However, full public financing and prohibitions on corporate independent expenditures significantly increase the probability of incumbent reelection.

To Know It Is to Loath It: Perceptions of Campaign Finance and Attitudes About Congress

We model attitudes about Congress as structured by perceptions of campaign finance. Attitudes about unlimited corporate and union spending are modeled as structured by knowledge about Congress. We find people with more factual knowledge of Congress were more likely to view unlimited independent corporate and union spending as having improper influence. We also found that people made some distinctions about sources of campaign finance. Knowledgeable people viewed unlimited independent expenditures as improper influence, but were less likely to perceive direct contributions from individuals to candidates as corrupt. When attitudes about Congress are estimated as a function of perceptions about financier influence, we find that perceptions about unlimited independent spending predicted negative views of representation and Congress, whereas perceptions of limited individual donations did not. People who knew the most about Congress were substantially more likely to find unlimited independent spending—the sort allowed by Citizens United—to be troubling.

The Buckley Constitution and the Strong Libertarian Paradigm of American Politics

Ironically, the strong libertarian paradigm uses wealth to constrict autonomy in ways that have interesting political theory parallels with the Lochner case. Both approaches limit participation in the democratic process. Lochner removed certain questions from democratic decision-making altogether. By affording property interests overwhelming political influence, the strong libertarian paradigm connects influence to wealth more than to votes or preference intensities. Buckley v. Valeo upheld congressional limitations on contributions to political campaigns, but struck down limitations on a candidate’s personal and total campaign expenditures. The Court also invalidated limits on independent expenditures to elect particular candidates made by others, including PACs, that were not given directly to the campaign. Buckley specifically rejected the government’s interest in equalizing the financial resources of candidates. In his partial concurrence and partial dissent, Justice White stated that the majority stood for the proposition “money talks.”