|
|
Chapter 1:
An Introduction to Public Financing
The election process lies at the very heart of republican
democracy. As such, election reform has been a consistent
theme of the last one hundred years of American political
dialogue. Early reforms, such as the introduction of the
Australian ballot, were followed by experiments with direct
primaries, non-partisan elections, and regulation of campaign
finances through the Corrupt Practices Act of 1925 and the Hatch
Act of 1940. [1]
Arguably the most fundamental change in the administration of
American elections has been the institution of government
financing of many election campaigns. Public campaign
financing is distinct from other campaign reforms because it
substitutes an alternative funding mechanism for political
campaigns rather than seeking to regulate the two existing
mechanisms; fundraising and candidate personal financing.
Despite the attention devoted to campaign finance reform efforts
on the federal level, it is in American states, over half of
which employ some form of public financing, where sufficient
diversity exists to make conclusions concerning the origins of
public financing systems.
Limited studies have been conducted assessing the effect of
specific state public financing measures. However, there
are no comprehensive nation-wide surveys of the origins of the
state systems. This study seeks to profile how American
states came to focus on campaign reforms, and explain why
individual states chose to implement specific forms of public
financing when they did.
TOP
A Brief History of Public
Financing
National and International Public
Financing
Democratic Representative William Bourke Cockran of New York
introduced the first proposal for public financing of elections
in the United States in 1904, in response to controversy
surrounding President Theodore Roosevelt’s extensive fundraising
in the heated election campaign of that year. [2]
Fueled by revelations of large corporate donations to both
political parties, pressure continued to build through 1907, at
which time President Roosevelt endorsed public financing for
party organizations.[3]
However, after much negotiation, the Tillman Act, banning
contributions by corporations to political candidates, passed as
a broad political compromise and diffused the pressure behind
public financing proposals. Although significant campaign
finance reform measures continued to be considered throughout
the succeeding decades, the next significant public financing
proposals were not advanced until the 1960’s. Overseas, the
first modern public funding of political entities was instituted
with the advent of the television age. Interestingly,
Costa Rica in 1954 and Argentina in 1955 were the first modern
countries to formally provide public funds for political
parties. European public financing of political parties
began in West Germany in 1959, and spread to Austria in 1963.
As the German political scientist Karl-Heinz Nassmacher
explains, the “political reasoning [for the early European
public financing systems] went along an almost classical line:
‘Parties had found that costs had been increasing, particularly
in the field of communications, and existing sources of income
were proving to be insufficient.’”[4]
In specific instances, such as that of Italy in 1974, public
financing adoption was facilitated by corruption scandals
resulting from this increased fundraising pressure.[5]
The pressures for public subsidies of political parties
continued to build during the 1960’s. By 1970 France,
Israel, and all four Scandinavian countries introduced public
financing of political parties.
Table 1.1: Countries with National
Public Financing as of 1988 [6]
|
Effective Date |
Country |
Effective Date |
Country |
|
1954 |
Costa Rica |
1972 |
The Netherlands |
|
1955 |
Argentina |
1974 |
Canada |
|
1959 |
West Germany |
1974 |
Italy |
|
1963 |
Austria |
1976 |
Japan |
|
1965 |
France |
1976 |
The United States |
|
1966 |
Sweden |
1977 |
Spain |
|
1967 |
Finland |
1978 |
Mexico |
|
1969 |
Denmark |
1978 |
Venezuela |
|
1969 |
Israel |
1983 |
Turkey |
|
1970 |
Norway |
1984 |
Australia |
|
1971 |
Brazil |
|
|
As in Europe, it is likely that the re-consideration of
public financing by American policy makers was a reaction to the
rising cost of televised campaigns and the resulting increased
pressure on the political fundraising system. The
percentage of American households with television sets soared
from 9% to 87% between 1950 and 1960, and for the first time in
the 1960 election, more Americans received their political news
from television than newspapers. [7]
The earliest post war American proposals for public financing
did in fact draw heavily from the overseas party-funding model.
In 1962, President Kennedy’s Commission on Campaign Costs,
charged with examining political campaigns in the new television
age, proposed public matching funds in presidential campaigns.
In 1966, in response to frenzied fundraising by the Johnson
Administration, Congress passed into law but swiftly repealed a
measure providing block grants to political parties for campaign
use. [8]
However, American policy makers soon realized that the
structure of the American political system required distinctive
policy approaches. With the exception of the minimal
systems of Latin America, the international public financing
provisions implemented before 1974 existed in a parliamentary
context where party-based electoral structures and unpredictable
election cycles meant that political financing was inevitably
synonymous with party financing. [9]
By contrast, the institutionalized election cycle and
candidate-centered nature of the American federal system meant
that problems of political money were more likely to occur in
the campaign financing of specific candidates directly
before the election. Such a system initially presented
serious hurdles, as parties tend to be more standardized and
predictable than individual candidates.
However, campaign costs were rapidly rising on both sides of
the Atlantic. The cost of presidential elections more than
doubled between 1968 and 1972, from $37 million to over $90
million dollars. [10]
Inspired by the fundraising scandals in Richard Nixon’s 1972
campaign uncovered by the Watergate investigations, in 1974
Congress significantly amended the 1971 Federal Election
Campaign Act (FECA) to include an innovative system of matching
public funds for presidential primaries and full public
financing of presidential general elections.[11]
In 1976, public money was used to fund a U.S. presidential
election for the first time.[12]
No significant federal campaign public financing measures have
been seriously considered since the last revision of FECA in
1979.
Public Financing in the States
Largely lost in the attention paid to national campaign
reforms, a simultaneous and far more comprehensive public
financing revolution was beginning on the state and local level.
In 1957 Puerto Rico implemented the first public financing
within the jurisdiction of the United States in the wake of the
Costa Rican and Argentinean reforms. The Puerto Rican
Election Fund Act, which provided significant block grants to
the island’s two major political parties, was designed to reduce
the dependence of the territory’s political parties on the
powerful sugar industry and end the informal practice of
requiring civil servants to contribute 2% of their income to the
ruling political party. [13]
Internationally, twenty German and Austrian laender and
the Canadian provinces of Quebec and Nova Scotia had instituted
public financing of local elections by the 1980’s.[14]
However, there are no indications that public financing in
American states was directly modeled on any of the local
overseas measures.
In 1973 four states, Iowa, Maine, Rhode Island, and Utah,
enacted the first public financing in the United States.
The movement continued as the Watergate scandal heated up, with
five more states passing public financing measures in 1974,
three in both 1975 and 1976, two in 1977, and one in 1978. [15]
In 1979, Seattle, Washington implemented the first municipal
public campaign finance system.[16]
State public financing of elections hit something of a plateau
in the 1980’s, with only six states and two municipalities
implementing systems over the course of the decade.[17]
In the early 1990’s a number of states which had implemented the
most comprehensive measures during the 1970’s reformed and
expanded their systems.[18]
The adoption of full public financing measures in Maine in 1996
and Vermont in 1997, heralded in a subsequent reform movement
dubbed Clean Elections, which eventually spread to Arizona,
Massachusetts, and the municipalities of Austin, Boulder,
Cincinnati, Oakland, and San Francisco.
Between 1972 and 2001 fourteen local governments and
twenty-seven state governments instituted public financing for
at least some of the political offices or parties under their
jurisdiction:
Table 1.2: State Public Financing as of 2001
|
Date of Adoption
(Significant Reform) |
State |
Date of Adoption
(Significant Reform) |
State |
|
1973 |
Iowa |
1976 |
Indiana |
|
1973 (1996) |
Maine |
1977 (Ended 1988) |
Oregon |
|
1973 (1988, 1992) |
Rhode Island |
1977 |
Wisconsin |
|
1973 |
Utah |
1978 |
Hawaii |
|
1974 |
Maryland |
1982 |
California |
|
1974 (1993) |
Minnesota |
1982 |
Virginia |
|
1974 (Ended 1979) |
Missouri |
1983 |
Alabama |
|
1974 |
Montana |
1985 (1991) |
Florida |
|
1974 (1989) |
New Jersey |
1987 |
Ohio |
|
1975 |
Idaho |
1988 (1998) |
Arizona |
|
1975 (1998) |
Massachusetts |
1992 |
Nebraska |
|
1975 |
North Carolina |
1992 |
New Mexico |
|
1976 (1992) |
Kentucky |
1997 |
Vermont |
|
1976 (1989) |
Michigan |
|
|
Table 1.3: Local Public Financing as of 2001 [19]
|
Date of Adoption
(Significant Reform) |
State |
Date of Adoption
(Significant Reform) |
State |
|
1978 (Ended 1992) |
Seattle, WA |
1995 |
Austin, TX |
|
1985 |
Tucson, AZ |
1998 |
Suffolk County, NY |
|
1986 (Ended 1990) |
Sacramento County, CA |
2000 |
Oakland, CA |
|
1988 |
New York City, NY |
2000 |
Petaluma, CA |
|
1989 (Ended 1992) |
King County, WA |
2000 |
San Francisco, CA |
|
1990 |
Los Angeles, CA |
2001 |
Boulder, CO |
|
1994 |
Long Beach, CA |
2001 |
Cincinnati, OH |
TOP
John W. Kingdon’s 1984 book Agendas, Alternatives, and
Public Policies has become a seminal work discussing the
nature of problem awareness, issue definition, and agenda
setting. [20]
Kingdon uses case studies in two national issue areas, health
and transportation policy, to explore how specific topics came
to dominate policy agendas. Kingdon argues that three
process streams largely determined of the federal agenda:
problem identification, policy generation, and political shifts.
According to Kingdon’s rationale, these three streams exist
independently of each other but are periodically coupled around
successful policy initiatives.
According to Kingdon’s theory, the problem and political
streams elevate broad issue areas to the national consciousness
and are largely dominated by visible clusters of governmental
actors such as elected officials and political appointees.
In contrast, specific policy alternatives are usually generated
by hidden clusters of policy entrepreneurs, including career
bureaucrats, interest groups, and other elements of civil
society. Significantly, these policies are often developed
based on policy entrepreneurs’ personal or institutional
interests, desire to promote values, or wish to affect the
system and arise independently from the problem or politics
streams.
To summarize, Kingdon’s hypothesis argues that the problem
and political streams periodically create windows of policy
opportunity by focusing the attention of government actors on
specific issue areas. Into these windows rush policy
entrepreneurs trying to link their pre-existing policies into
the specific issues on the agenda.
A recent example might help to illustrate Kingdon’s theory.
Following the September 11th terrorist attacks and
the subsequent war on terror, American dependence on Middle
Eastern energy suppliers became an important concern for
American policy-makers. [21]
Consequently, numerous bureaucrats, interest groups, and
academics stepped into this breach pushing policies ranging from
heightened hydrogen fuel cell development,[22]
to increased ethanol production,[23]
to greater cooperation with the Russian government.[24] Most
of these policy entrepreneurs had developed these proposals far
before the focusing events of September 2001. However, in
the aftermath of 9/11, many of these constituencies attempted to
tie their policy proposals into the policy window created by the
problem of the attacks.
Windows of opportunity are brief due to the short attention
span of politicians, the media, and the public. Therefore,
as Frank Baumgartner and Bryan Jones assert in Agendas and
Instability in American Politics, the evolution of American
government policy is typified by a state of punctuated
equilibrium, where the traditional policy monopolies of
interlocking alliances of elites are periodically altered by the
spotlight of specific problems. [25]
In this study, I turn Kingdon’s work around, by using his
theories as a starting place for exploring how a particular
issue area, reform of the campaign finance system, reached the
public agenda of specific states. There are two significant ways
in which state campaign finance reform legislation provides an
interesting test of Kingdon’s theory. More than any other
issue, campaign finance directly affects the status of elected
officials within the government, and thus combines the problem
and politics streams to a greater degree than other issue areas.
The second challenge of this study lies in my focus on the state
rather than the national political arena. States provide
an interesting test of Kingdon’s conclusions, both because of
their varied political culture and because of their distinctive
mechanisms of governance.
The relevance of Kingdon’s ideas may change when they are
used to explain how a single distinctive issue reached the
agendas of the political classes in a geographically and
culturally distinct group of states rather than a single
national political bureaucracy. Furthermore, state
government mechanisms, including peculiarities of interest group
interaction and the frequent use of ballot measures, may change
the relative balance of power between specific groups and
constituencies in the agenda setting and alternative
specification roles.
Kingdon restricts his analysis to the agenda setting and
alternative specification aspects of policy determination, while
leaving the factors influencing the choice of a specific
alternative and the implementation of this choice unaddressed.
However, when examining a precise policy outcome, it is
necessary to assess the decision-making element of policy
formation. Over two-thirds of states have enacted at least
one major new campaign finance law in the last thirty years. [26]
However, only a small percentage of these laws contain public
financing. Thus, in addition to explaining how state political
actors come to perceive a problem with their democratic process,
one must also clarify why, and in what cases, a consensus is
generated around the specific policy of public financing of
elections.
David Nice presents the only significant previous inquiry
into the reasons for the adoption of public financing as a
chapter in Policy Innovation in State Government. [27]
Nice argues that three main factors influence the adoption of
specific policy innovations: problems, resources, and (what I
will call) civic culture. Nice’s first two factors are
mainly negative. As Kingdon acknowledges, the nature of
the specific challenge inspiring action necessarily eliminates
those policy alternatives which are unlikely to solve the given
problem. The resources available to government actors,
often in the form of budgets or constitutional powers, further
limit the range of existing choices. Nice places the most
emphasis on his third factor, civic culture. Nice argues
that civic culture could play a significant role in determining
state policy outcomes, and that culture varies between states.
This cultural factor could play both a positive and negative
role in the decision-making process between policy
alternatives.It is helpful to separate Nice’s third factor into
two general categories: political culture and party ideology.
To generalize, political culture revolves around the values of
citizens concerning change. Party ideology could be
defined as the attitude of the political classes toward
government.
Nice divides political culture into three broad archetypes
loosely based on Daniel Elazar’s seminal 1966 study American
Federalism; the traditionalist, the individualist, and
moralist archetypes. [28]
Nice measures party ideology along the simple scale of Liberal
vs. Conservative. He describes these archetypes in terms
of views concerning government action as defined by party
platforms and major party policy initiatives.
Conservatives are generally reluctant to use government to
institute change, whereas Liberals are generally eager to use
government to institute change. To quantify these values,
Nice uses a 1978 study by Eugene McGregor which uses decades of
presidential convention role call votes to place the Democratic
and Republican Parties in every state on a –1 to 1 scale of
liberalism and conservatism.[29]
Nice applies his theories of state innovation to eleven issue
areas, including public financing. Nice analyzes the
political cultures and party ideologies of the sixteen states
which instituted public financing by August 1981. [30]
He does not specifically address emergent problems or resources
available to these states, but theorizes that these may have
been important factors.
Nice asserts that public financing is more likely in states
that have highly moralistic political cultures.
Furthermore, he concludes public financing is more likely in
states that have relatively liberal Republican ideologies and
that have experienced Democratic Party dominance during the
period of implementation. [31]
Problems with
Nice’s Analysis
Nice’s study is incomplete for four major reasons:
Chapter 2 explores many of the difficulties inherent to
quantifying political culture. However, before proceeding
further, it may be beneficial to address the means by which this
study attempts to rectify the other three problems listed above:
Updating the
Sample
The number and variety of public financing measures has
greatly increased since Nice’s study. Since 1981, the
number of states employing public financing measures has nearly
doubled to twenty-seven, while the number of local measures has
more than tripled to fourteen. A small number of sources
contain profiles of state public financing systems, though up to
now no single source presents a truly comprehensive and up to
date database of all public financing measures in the United
States.
The U.S. Federal Election Commission’s
National Clearinghouse on Election Administration puts out a
periodic summary of state campaign finance laws. [32]
The Council of State Government’s in Lexington, KY also produces
two publications, The COGEL Blue Book and The Book of
the States, which often present data on state campaign
finance laws. In addition, there have been a small number
of academic studies which contain public financing information.
Herbert Alexander, under the auspices of the Citizens’ Research
Foundation, produced a study of statewide public financing
measures in 1986, which was updated in 1992.[33]
CRF also summarized six public financing
systems in local elections in 1999.[34]
Michael Malbin and Thomas Gais compile a profile of state
campaign finance laws in The Day After Reform.[35]
In addition, Joel Thompson’s work Campaign Finance in State
Legislative Elections contains a limited number of
references to public financing systems.[36]
To update these studies, I compiled a
comprehensive database of all state and local public financing
laws with a brief profile of the distinctive characteristics and
origins of each of these measures. I also contacted
election officials, academics, and democracy interest groups in
every state and examined the actual laws in question. A
list of the states which have adopted public financing is
contained in Table 1.2 above. The full database profiling
every public financing measure is included in Addendum 1.
Malbin and Gais’ analysis of state
disclosure regulations and spending limits shows a definite
evolution of these reforms. The earliest state reforms
during the 1970’s focused mainly on disclosure requirements and
restrictions of atypical behavior such as excessively large
campaign contributions or potentially corrupting practices. [37]
However, later reforms “were often designed to alter the more
typical flows of private money into politics” through lower
contribution limits and extensive reporting requirements.[38]
Many experts account for this shift as a reaction to the
increased cost and complexity of campaigns during this
period. For example, in the decade between 1980 and 1990,
average spending for gubernatorial candidates increased 44
percent after adjusting for inflation.[39]
Simultaneously, the average number of interest groups per state
nearly doubled.[40]
An examination of the progression of state
and local public financing measures reveals some similar trends.
Sixteen significant state public financing measures were
implemented by 1980. These systems were made up
exclusively of partial matching and block grant mechanisms and
were usually very limited in scope. Implementation of
reforms continued at a trickle through the 1980’s, perhaps
because of resource restraints due to budgetary and anti-tax
pressures. In the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, a number
of states made attempts to reform and strengthen their existing
public financing systems. In the latter half of the
1990’s a small wave of public financing initiatives created
systems in four states and at least four municipalities.
Significantly, these later initiatives created the first
non-federal full public financing systems. [41]
In addition, five of these later state and
municipal measures were passed by direct democracy ballot
initiatives. For whatever reason, the evolution of public
financing legislation seems to indicate increasing distrust of
private money in the campaign finance system over the last
thirty years.
TOP
Distinguishing Between
Varieties of Public Financing
Because of the wide variety of public campaign finance
measures, it is problematic to define state financing of
elections. The most important key, or common element, is
the dispersal of “public money.” Thus, a public financing
system must disburse money (rather than in-kind contributions of
materials or services such as airtime). Furthermore, this
money must pass through the public sphere. Thus, measures
allowing tax deductions or tax credits for contributors (such as
in Alaska and a number of other states) are not considered
public financing for the purposes of this study, since state
governments never actually possess these campaign funds.
Another characteristic common across all public financing
systems is their voluntary nature. In light of Supreme
Court decisions equating spending money with free speech, all
public financing measures have necessarily been designed to
compliment or run parallel to traditional private financing
patterns, without inherently replacing them. [42]
Public financing systems can further entrench or greatly
weaken existing parties, politicians, and policies. The
effect of public financing depends the design of specific
systems. In her 1981 article “State Public Campaign
Finance: Implications for Partisan Politics,” [43]
Ruth Jones outlines a number of public financing policy choices
available to lawmakers. I have expanded on her list to
illustrate the varieties of campaign financing systems:
Public financing funds can be allocated through direct budget
appropriations, specific charges, or taxpayer check-off or
add-on mechanisms. States which provide simple block
grants to political parties often use the tax code to allow
citizens to direct a prescribed amount to a specific political
party, rather than to the system as a whole. Such systems
could aptly be described as institutionalized contribution
mechanisms, and are generally designed to achieve very different
purposes than impartially disbursed systems. Presently,
seven states allow public funds to be dispersed to partisan
entities without regulating the spread or ratio of this
allocation. [44]
Public funds can also be distributed impartially to political
parties or directly to candidates themselves. Some of
these systems are consciously crafted to either strengthen
parties or to strengthen candidates in the electoral process.
Furthermore, the regulations determining the eligibility of
third parties and third party candidates for public funds differ
significantly across states. Third party participation
also significantly influences the effect of public financing
measures and may often be associated with different conceptions
of the political problems to be addressed. Currently,
eight states appropriate money to political parties, while
fifteen states appropriate funds directly to candidates, and
four states provide money to both. [45]
Barriers to third party entry tend to be significant in most
systems, but vary greatly.
Public financing can range from small block grants to full
financing of elections and can be dispersed using a variety of
mechanisms. Nearly all dispersal ranges and mechanisms can
be categorized into three types:
Full: Full public financing consists of
block grants to candidates with strings attached. By
taking public money candidates agree to forego raising or
spending any additional money. [46]
Effective full public financing systems generally appropriate
sufficient public money to run a campaign for the given office
and usually contain additional matching fund mechanisms for
candidates whose non-participating opponents outspend them.
A truly full public financing system becomes the only
significant funding source for participating candidate’s
campaigns, and thus is designed to exclude private money from
the campaign system. Currently, four states have full
public financing systems for one or more offices. [47]
Partial: Partial public financing generally
consists of grants disbursed on a set ratio to participating
candidates. The majority of these partial systems provide
matching grants, though some systems use flat grants. In a
one to one matching system, one dollar of public financing is
given to a candidate for every dollar of private contributions
this candidate raises. Some systems only match
contributions up to a certain amount, thus increasing the
importance of smaller donations. Often this effect is
multiplied by additional provisions lowering contribution
limits. Sometimes partial financing includes stipulations
requiring certain actions during the campaign, such as
participation in debates. In many cases partial public
financing includes overall spending caps for participating
candidates.
Most partial public financing measures fund a ratio rather
than a set amount of a candidate’s campaign. Partial
public financing systems are designed to augment and reduce, but
not eliminate private campaign financing. Currently, there
are ten states with partial funding systems. [48]
Simple Grants: Simple public financing
grants disperse a set amount of public money, generally without
any strings attached. Unlike full public financing systems
(where grants must be large enough to fund a whole campaign),
simple grant systems can disperse relatively insignificant
funding amounts. Unlike full and partial public financing,
public grants are almost exclusively appropriated for a party
rather than to a specific candidate or election cycle.
Simple public grants commonly do not provide the only
significant funding for a candidate or party and generally do
not constrain the behavior of participating candidates or
parties in any way. Their main effect is on the
distribution ratios of money in the campaign system. As
such, simple grants are designed to increase the amount of money
in the system rather than reduce it. At present, there are
eleven states with simple grant systems. [49]
As mentioned above, many public financing systems include
responsibilities imposed upon the receipt of public funds.
The nature of these requirements (or the lack thereof) greatly
influences political behavior and thus often defines the impact
of the system. Therefore, these conditions can serve as
evidence when determining the intentions of the framers of
public financing systems.
All public financing systems that disburse money directly to
candidates allocate funds for the general election.
However, a sub-set of public financing systems allocate funds
for primary campaigns as well. Funding of primaries
greatly increases the cost and complexity of public financing
measures, but also, assumedly, expands their effect.
Currently eleven state systems fund both primary and general
election campaigns while three systems fund only general
election campaigns. [50]
Public financing measures vary greatly in range of offices
covered. They can include the governor, the lt. governor,
other constitutional officers, the state legislature, parties,
and local officers. Public financing systems usually
distribute different amounts to candidates for each office
(though partial public financing systems often maintain a set
ratio across all races). Currently, five states cover just
the governors race, three states cover the governor and some
other statewide offices, and seven states cover the governor,
statewide offices, and legislative elections. [51]
In designing public financing systems, drafters must decide
whether to create a new agency to administer the system or to
confer this authority to existing agencies. In addition,
sponsors must determine the enforcement powers to be given to
this agency and the degree of discretion the agency will be
allowed in administering the program. Because issues of
administration and enforcement are primarily relevant for the
implementation phase of policy innovation, they are largely
beyond the scope of this study.
An adequate explanation for the adoption of state public
financing measures has never been advanced. David Nice
presents brief but interesting theories concerning the nature of
states which implemented public financing. However, his analysis
takes for granted the specific reasons that public financing
measures may have been implemented, and is now very out of date.
Malbin and Gais advance hypotheses concerning the inspirations
of public financing, but their arguments are based largely on
speculation. An examination of the history and variety of
state public financing measures indicates the likelihood that
their supporters may have been addressing entirely different
problems or intending starkly different outcomes.
Any attempt to understand the intentions of the framers of
public financing laws must include evidence concerning the
process of diffusion of ideas across states. It is also
important to understand the relationship between federal and
state agendas concerning campaign finance issues.
Significant numbers of state laws were passed at times of
heightened awareness of federal campaign finance problems, such
as the 1972 funding scandals. However, there has not been
a comprehensive study concerning the nature of this
relationship.
To determine the intentions of the initial decision-makers
who chose public financing, I have gone directly to the source.
I drafted a short set of survey questions which I administered
mainly via email to individuals (including politicians,
academics, and activists) who were active, influential, or
closely observant during the passage of public financing
measures in their state.
The pool for these surveys was expanded through a snowball
sampling scheme whereby everyone I found gave me further names
in addition to answering my questions. The final
tally was sixty-two surveys completed by individuals in
twenty-one states. To gain further information,
telephone interviews were conducted with twenty-nine relevant
individuals in twelve states. There were significant
drawbacks to this method, since it was inevitably piecemeal.
Only a tiny percentage of individuals contacted returned
completed surveys. Interviews and surveys could not be
administered with equal frequency to decision-makers in every
state with public financing and a certain handful of states,
especially those whose systems were more recently implemented,
generated the majority of responses. However, the wide
variety of state measures meant that surveys and interviews
were conducted with representatives of most of the major
geographic regions and public financing archetypes. The
survey and interview results were further supplemented by
additional information available through existing government
resources and academic works. Data and interviews from
specific municipalities with public financing measures were
used in certain cases to supplement the state data.
TOP
A Brief
Outline of the Rest of the Study
Chapter 2 surveys a variety of predictive mechanisms
to determine patterns and similarities in state adoption of
public financing. A clear correspondence is found
between adoption of partial and full public financing and
Democratic Party dominance, as well as high relative levels of
liberal political ideology, economic and social development,
civic culture, and white ethnic diversity. In addition,
using classifications of state political culture developed by
Daniel Elazar, a clear correspondence is confirmed between
more moralistic political culture and adoption of partial and
full public financing. The chapter then uses theoretical
and empirical data from a variety of authors to construct a
general model of state characteristics which may serve to
explain adoption of more comprehensive varieties of public
financing. Throughout the chapter, a clear
difference is shown between the characteristics of states
adopting simple grant party public financing systems and
states adopting more comprehensive partial and full public
financing systems.
Chapter 3 presents the major findings of the survey
and interview study concerning Kingdon’s model of agenda
generation. It explains why election reform rose to the
agenda of specific states at specific times and why public
financing was considered a viable alternative. In
particular, it highlights the role that scandals and other
focusing events in raising election reform to the agenda, and
the role that Common Cause and other public interest groups
often play in advancing public financing of elections as an
attractive policy alternative. In addition, Chapter 3
outlines patterns in the intentions of the policy
entrepreneurs and eventual decision-makers during the window
surrounding the implementation of public financing
legislation. Specifically, it highlights the occasional
confluence between politicians trying to improve their
standing with the public, good government advocates attempting
to reduce the cost of campaigns, and progressive activists
wanting to increase the influence of less wealthy segments of
the population.
Chapter 3 also briefly discusses the agenda generation
relationship between states and the federal government and
outlines the major players in state agenda determination.
Finally, it confirms Kingdon’s hypotheses and the findings of
Chapter 2 by presenting case studies of state processes which
eventually resulted in public financing measures. The
case studies include examples of full, partial, and simple
grant public financing measures from a wide regional,
cultural, and demographic variety of states. Particular
emphasis is placed on states which typify patterns of public
financing or break from established norms and expectations.
Specific observations and examples from other states and
municipalities are integrated into the chapter to round out
the analysis.
Chapter 4 recaps the basic determinations of the
study and proposes some lessons that should be drawn from
these conclusions. It also places the findings in the
larger context of election reform and makes predictions about
the future course of public financing policy determination.
Addendum 1 is a database listing and profiling all
state public financing measures in the United States.
Readers are urged to refer to this database whenever they have
questions about the nature of public financing systems in
specific states.
Addendum 2 is the survey questionnaire distributed
to individuals connected to the adoption of public financing
in their states.
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 Proceed to
Chapter 2:
Factors
Affecting the Adoption of Public Financing
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| Footnotes:
Alexander, Herbert. Goss, Eugene. Schwartz, Jeffrey Public
Financing of State Elections Citizens’ Research Foundation
at USC Los Angeles, CA 1986, 1992
Alexander, Herbert Public Financing of
Local Elections
Thompson, Joel Campaign Finance in State Legislative
Elections Congressional Quarterly Press Washington DC
1998
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