The purpose of this chapter is two-fold. First, it presents the basic findings of the survey and interviews concerning Kingdon’s model of political decision-making. Second, it presents case studies of the circumstances and actions surrounding adoption of public financing in states with differing political cultures. These studies may help to determine variations within the policy generation model of state governments and may eventually explain some of the apparent anomalies highlighted in Chapter 2.

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In nearly all instances of comprehensive partial or full public financing, these systems can be traced to proposals advanced by identifiable policy entrepreneurs and developed long before public financing had reached the agenda of the government actors in their states. The names of a few usual suspects recurred repeatedly in inquiries about the origin of the idea of public financing. For example, the public interest organization Common Cause was the major entrepreneur in at least four of the six partial public financing systems initiated during the 1970’s.

The League of Women Voters was established in 1920 to institutionalize women’s suffrage. However, its impact was not strong in the institutional government reform arena for nearly fifty years.^[143] In the 1970’s, the League of Women Voters began to take an active role in campaign reform alternative generation. In 1971, 300 local leagues launched an Election Systems Project designed to survey the election process around the country.^[144] At the time of the 1974 FECA revision, the League adopted a position stating "the methods of financing political campaigns should ensure the public's right to know, combat corruption and undue influence, enable candidates to compete more equitably for public office, and allow maximum citizen participation in the political process."^[145]

In the early 1990’s a series of citizen groups in the Northeast loosely affiliated with US Action, and later Public Campaign, also became active public financing policy generators. Finally, in certain states Public Interest Research Groups (started by Ralph Nader) and State Reform Parties (started by Ross Perot) became active during the phase of policy development and promotion as part of the broad issue network which typified the government reform movement.

Many of the major organizational policy entrepreneurs embrace wide-ranging "good government" missions. However, the state level entrepreneurs and activists surrounding this issue show a wide range of goals connected to their support of public financing. As Ruth S. Jones, an academic observer of Arizona politics observes, in the 1998 public financing campaign, the reason "supporters [were] pushing the [public financing] measure depended entirely on who you asked—there were many different agendas."^[146] In the email surveys I distributed, supporters of public financing legislation were asked to rank their reasons for developing or supporting public financing proposals in a list of the major possible goals of public financing. The list ran as follows:

There was a great deal of variation in responses, indicating that many players supported the same legislation for very different reasons. However, a majority of respondents who seemed to be active in the entrepreneurial stage of public financing development indicated increasing equality or equal opportunity in the political system (32%) or reducing the cost of campaigns (26%) as their main goal in developing public financing legislation.^[147] The emphasis on equality among many public financing entrepreneurs is a striking reminder of the high level of support for public financing among relatively moralistic and egalitarian organizations and constituencies. Many social justice advocates seem to have viewed public financing as a necessary means of assuring political, not simply economic and social, equality in America. The support from advocates of reducing the costs of campaigns is significantly connected to the Buckley v. Valeo Supreme Court ruling in 1976, which established that campaign spending limits could only be imposed voluntarily. After this ruling, public financing systems tide to spending limits became, along with contribution limits, one of the primary means by which "good government" advocates sought to reduce the cost of campaigns.

It is important to note that public interest organizations played at least two very distinct roles during the policy generation process which must not be confused. The first, and true entrepreneurial role, was that of developing proposals for public financing. This research and development function was mainly fulfilled by the chief organizers and paid staff of these organizations, often on the national level, though state level policy generation became successively more sophisticated as time progressed. Common Cause, developed significant research while pushing for public financing of national presidential and congressional races which was eventually used by many state members. For instance, New Jersey’s public financing system for gubernatorial elections seems to be a direct offshoot of the presidential primary public financing system instituted as part of the FECA revisions in 1974.

The second major function of these public interest organizations was to serve as umbrella networks for lobbying and pushing for public financing legislation once windows of opportunity arose. These functions were almost exclusively pursued at the state level, often by relatively large and overlapping volunteer networks, which are very hard to trace. With the exception of the ballot initiative reforms of the 1990’s, the second function tended to arise during specific windows of policy opportunity created by outside circumstances, and was not directly connected with the policy generation function.

The origins of simple grant party public financing are less conclusive. Common Cause, the League of Women Voters, and Public Campaign do not officially support such measures in their national position papers. The reason for this is relatively simple. By their basic nature, simple grants accomplish neither of the two goals cited most often by the supporters of more comprehensive partial public financing measures—reducing the cost of campaigns and increasing equal opportunity in elections. Because simple grants are dispersed without any connected fundraising restrictions, their net effect can often be to increase, rather than decrease, the amount of money surrounding elections. Furthermore, since simple grant measures are allocated to parties rather than candidates, there no guarantee that the public funds are used to increase access to the political system.

Determining the actual entrepreneurs behind simple grant public financing is problematic. Whereas the vast majority of more comprehensive public financing systems have been adopted or significantly reformed in the last fifteen years, most simple grant public financing systems were implemented in the 1970’s and early 1980’s and have remained unchanged since. In addition to the sheer weight of time, simple grant systems often are very small, with some only dispersing a few thousand dollars per year, and thus are not high on the political consciousness of many people. Finally, though it could be a consequence of their smaller stature, politicians, party officials, and activists do not seem eager to claim credit for generating simple grant public financing proposals.

The data which can be gleaned concerning the origins of simple grant public financing measures indicates that parties themselves, and politicians closely connected to parties, have been the origin of most simple grant public financing proposals. During the legislative debate over Maine’s 1973 measure, a state senator noted that the bill "has no opponents and, again, demonstrating unusual solidarity from both political parties, the executive secretaries [are] forcefully in favor of this type of legislation."^[148] As Sally Davis, Executive Director of Common Cause New Mexico, explains, "political parties work in close connection with state legislators" and a contribution mechanism institutionalized through the tax code "is exactly the sort of measure they can slip in under the radar screens."^[149] Pressure from the political parties seems to have been the primary reason for the adoption of simple grant measures in Indiana, New Mexico, Ohio, and Utah.

Political party support of simple grant legislation appears to be universal. However, it should be noted that in two states, Maine and Massachusetts, at least some of the politicians supporting simple grant provisions during the 1970’s espoused egalitarian rhetoric similar to that advanced by later supporters of more comprehensive public financing measures. In Maine for instance, a primary supporter of the 1973 simple grant measure in the House asserted that by establishing a $1 check-off for political parties on state tax returns, "we are trying to encourage people other than the wealthy to get into the process of financing campaigns."^[150] Both Maine and Massachusetts went on to implement full public financing systems in the 1990’s. Thus, it might be the case that some supporters of the 1970 simple grant measures came to believe that these systems had not fully accomplished their original egalitarian goals, and thus pushed for more comprehensive measures.

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In most states with partial or full public financing, activists and public interest organizations had been developing their proposals for years before they were finally adopted. In nearly every state surveyed, the partial public financing proposals were swiftly elevated to the top of the agenda primarily by at least one of two types of focusing events.

The most common of these events was a gripping national or state political scandal. During the mid-1970’s, campaign reform proposals were elevated by the national attention paid to campaign fundraising abuses brought to light by the Watergate investigations. Interviews with public officials indicate that it is no coincidence that the first partial public financing systems, in Maryland, Minnesota, and New Jersey, were adopted in 1974, the height of the Watergate crisis and the year that the United States Congress adopted public financing of presidential elections in its reform of FECA. The effect of national scandals seems to be less pronounced in determining the agenda surrounding adoption of partial public financing measures during the 1980’s and 1990’s, but should not be discounted.

Even in the context of national events, in the vast majority of states internal scandals played the decisive role in catapulting public financing to the agenda. Three states, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, instituted partial public financing measures mainly on the basis of national events and concern about long-term campaign trends. However, in at least seven of the fourteen partial or full public financing states—Arizona, Hawaii, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, and New Jersey —a significant local corruption scandal was a decisive factor in opening a window for the groups supporting public financing of elections. In addition, scandals were decisive factors in the reform of systems in Florida and Minnesota.

The connection between government corruption scandals and public financing is particularly striking considering that public financing is at best an indirect method of reducing corruption. Unlike measures creating stringent disclosure laws, contribution limits, or enforcement agencies, public financing rarely addresses the specific source of the corruption scandal. Instead, public financing provisions provide a new source of political money which would theoretically be open to abuse and embezzlement as well. In fact, in policy entrepreneur responses to the survey, ending corruption was mentioned significantly less than creating equal opportunity in the political system and reducing the cost of campaigns as the primary goal of public financing advocates. This factor suggests that in some instances public financing entrepreneurs successfully have tied their pre-existing solutions to a window created by only indirectly related political corruption.

A slightly less common factor elevating public financing to the agenda of specific states has been focusing events bringing the rising cost of elections to public attention. In nearly all states surveyed, public financing supporters and officials alike cited concern about the rising cost of campaigns as a significant reason for their support. However, in certain states a specific focusing event, usually an election campaign which vastly exceeded all established norms of campaign spending, seemed to galvanize media attention sufficiently to bring a chronic problem to the fore and raise election finance reform to the top of the agenda. In Rhode Island, for instance, legislative attention concerning expansion of the states public financing law was focused by outrage at a 1990 gubernatorial election which was the second most expensive per capita in the nation and which exceeded the sum spent in neighboring Massachusetts, a far larger state.^[151] In Florida, by contrast, the refusal of populist gubernatorial candidate Lawton Chiles to accept donations larger than $100 in the 1990 campaign also focused attention on campaign financing. Similar focusing events played important roles in bringing public financing under consideration in Nebraska, Vermont, and a number of municipalities, including Boulder CO, Oakland CA, Petaluma CA, and San Francisco CA.

Agenda generation for party simple grant public financing is less attached to specific events and opportunity windows, and more a function of a gradually growing awareness of a long-term problem. The idea of appropriating money to political parties was widely used in Europe and was nearly passed as a compromise method of congressional public financing during the FECA revisions in 1974.^[152] Interviews (as well as the very limited nature of the majority of simple grant public financing provisions themselves) indicate that most of the party public financing systems were designed to support the political party bureaucracy in a shifting campaign environment rather than to directly aid candidates themselves. Indeed a number of state measures even bar direct transfers of public funds to political candidates.

A byproduct of increasingly expensive televised campaigns during the 1970’s was a re-orientation of power toward candidates and away from political parties. In order to maintain their relevance, many state political parties sought to transform their diffuse volunteer based organizations into professional consulting establishments, which had resulting high overhead costs.^[153] As Brad Shaw, Political Director of the Ohio Republican Party states, "it [is] in the best interests of the voters of Ohio to have strong political parties which can get out the word about their candidates."^[154] Data from Indiana, New Mexico, Ohio, and Utah indicates that the financial pressures brought about by the professionalization of party bureaucracies forced party public financing options onto the agenda of legislative leaders who often also doubled as state party leaders. Even in Maine, the Chair of the Legislature’s Elections Committee asserted in 1973 that the pending simple grant measure "would bring in quite a lot of money and I am sure that both political parties need . . . more of this."^[155]

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The success of partial public financing systems in state legislatures appears to be incumbent on two major factors, support of a significant legislative leader and the successful promotion of public financing as a means to improve the public’s perception of politicians and government. By necessity, nearly every public financing measure has enjoyed the strong support of at least one of the major legislative leaders. On occasion a legislative leader has even played the decisive role in raising public financing to the agenda and single-handedly securing its passage. For instance, the public financing measure passed by the Florida legislature in 1985 was raised from an obscure Common Cause policy paper to a state law by the sole support of the Democratic Speaker of the House James Herald Thompson.

However, in most cases of successful public financing adoption, especially in instances of recent scandals, public financing seems to be supported by a majority of legislators in an effort to inoculate themselves against the current scandal. Indeed, a clear majority (58%) of public officials in the survey indicated that their primary reason for supporting public financing was to improve public perception of politics and politicians. As Marc Ash, a State Representative in Minnesota during the 1993 reforms remembers, "a scandal with illegal phone charges" made many incumbent legislators feel it was important to take a stand against the "roll of lobbyists and large contributors" in the face of media and civic group pressure.^[156] Thus, after passing the necessary initial hurdle of leadership support, comprehensive public financing measures gain ground in the legislature when politicians, fearful of a public backlash, are convinced their constituents would perceive public financing as a concerted step to reform the campaign finance system.

The influences surrounding adoption of full public financing measures often vary greatly from the legislative partial public financing initiatives because three of the four existing systems were instituted by direct democracy ballot measures. By contrasting the campaign messages of successful full public financing initiative campaigns—in Arizona, Maine, and Massachusetts—with unsuccessful campaigns—in Missouri and Oregon—it is possible to develop some preliminary conclusions concerning why the public in certain states ended up supporting full public financing.

Overall, the winning campaign messages were a combination of emotional and rational common sense campaign slogans. In Maine, the homogeneous and moralistic political culture preserved a certain respect for government even as "92% of Mainers believ[ed] that there was too much money in politics."^[157] Thus, negative emotional and rational messages focused on special interests rather than politicians, emphasizing slogans such as "give special interests their walking papers" and "important issues are at stake and special interests call the shots."^[158] In Massachusetts, where respect for government was also relatively high, supporters emphasized how "good people were caught in a bad system" so as not to alienate politicians and political partisans in the state.^[159] Even in Arizona, where a lobbying scandal had recently tarnished the state’s political establishment, supporters emphasized how the new system would "reduc[e] the influence of Special Interest groups and their Big Money" rather than directly targeting politicians.^[160]

The successful positive messages generally focused on what the full public financing system would do rather than what it would be. In Maine, the campaign pushed the rational message that a full public financing system would restore "one person one vote" and trumpeted the emotional message that under a new system "every kid could grow up to be president."^[161] In Arizona, which had a more individualistic culture, supporters emphasized how clean elections would allow "voters [to] have more choices between candidates."^[162]

The decisive message difference in unsuccessful full public financing ballot campaigns seems to be the ability of opponents to focus debate on the public financing system itself rather than its effects. In these campaigns, opponents successfully emphasized that the systems would "use taxpayer funds to pay for negative campaigns" and construed the system as "too long and complicated."^[163]

Simple grant systems are often brought to the fore by legislative and party leaders who combine the policy entrepreneur and agenda determination functions themselves. Because of the low level of public attention surrounding the adoption of simple grant measures, the most significant controversy often revolves around questions of who has to pay. Indeed, issues of where money for political parties would come from was the only significant debate reported in any of the surveys returned from simple grant public financing systems. In Indiana, for example, political party contributions existed as unofficial but mandatory levies on public sector salaries in the 1970’s and 1980’s before legislators attempted to set up a successor tax check-off public financing system and then finally settled on an arrangement funneling revenue from state vanity license plates to the political parties.^[164] As a general rule, however, simple grant public financing measures tend to be passed with very limited amounts of public debate or alternative generation.

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The remainder of this chapter is devoted to illustrating the patterns and tendencies outlined so far in Chapters 2 and 3 through a serious of six case studies. These examples illustrate the majority of archetypes and exceptions to the major trends in public financing adoption. Every attempt was made to examine the circumstances surrounding the adoption of a representative variety of measures. Accordingly, a roughly equal number of measures were chosen from the 1970’s, 1980’s and 1990’s. In addition, two of the case studies are devoted to states in each of Elazar’s moralistic, individualistic, and traditionalistic categories. Roughly half of these states are considered homogeneous and half are considered heterogeneous according to Hero’s social diversity index. Unfortunately, no bifurcated states are represented due to the very small number of public financing measures instituted in these states. Florida is very nearly bifurcated according to Hero’s classifications, but has been greatly affected by a recent influx of white ethnic retirees from the Northeast which has propelled it into the complex heterogeneous category.

Unfortunately, the case studies are heavily weighted toward partial public financing systems and contain only one example each of full and simple grant public financing adoption. For the case of full public financing this is understandable because of the small number of such systems currently in place. However, the relative lack of simple grant data is more disappointing, since these measures make up nearly half of the public financing systems in the country. Some of the problems in researching simple grant systems, such as their fairly small size and the apparent reticence of many supporters to speak about their efforts, have been outlined above. In addition, the majority of simple grant party financing measures were adopted in the 1970’s, which makes research particularly hard due to the high turnover rate of professional staff at most political party central committees.

The case studies are presented with an eye toward evaluating Kingdon’s theories as they apply to state policy generation within the specific policy arena of campaign financing. However, my research differs from Kingdon’s in that it examines policies instituted years and even decades in the past rather than cataloging the rise and fall of issue areas in real time. Thus, one may observe that the stories presented here sometimes appear more rational and choreographed than Kingdon’s model, since the primary entrepreneurs and politicians have been able to rationalize their actions in hindsight and put their strategies into a larger context over time. This tendency, though vexing, does not in my opinion negate the relevance of this study as an elaboration of Kingdon’s theory. The vagaries of time and memory may have shaped particular views in some of these chronicles, but they do not negate the broad themes illustrated by these case studies.

Minnesota and Wisconsin provide classic examples of early partial public financing systems. Both states implemented public financing for all statewide executive offices and were the first two states to adopt public financing for their legislatures in the 1970’s. Minnesota adopted its system in 1974 and Wisconsin adopted its system in 1977. Minnesota substantially reformed its system in 1993, which has provided for an impressive candidate participation rate of well over 90% in every election cycle since then.^[165] Wisconsin has not significantly reformed its system since 1977, leaving it relatively under-funded and leading to a candidate participation rate barely over 50% per election cycle during the 1990’s.^[166]

The similarities between Minnesota and Wisconsin are not simply in their public financing systems. Both states were originally populated largely by Scandinavian immigrants and settlers from New England. They are classified by Elazar as purely moralistic and are homogeneous according to Hero’s social diversity index. The common Northern European heritage of both states provides a much more liberal center of political gravity than that in the majority of their homogeneous western neighbors. Thus, it makes sense to examine Minnesota and Wisconsin in combination, as together they provide the purest archetype of the patterns outlined in Chapter 2 of the earliest phase of partial public financing adoption.

Research indicates that the initial measures in both Minnesota and Wisconsin were brought onto the agenda mainly by the national Watergate scandals and not by local state scandals. As Jay Heck, the Executive Director of Common Cause Wisconsin, explains "the national Watergate reforms [inspired] Wisconsin Common Cause members to propose a state public financing system" to lower the cost of campaigns.^[167] For Minnesota, the public financing reforms are presented as a "preemptive strike," a statement that "it shall not happen here," by the then President of the League of Women Voters, Mary Anne McCoy.^[168]

The politics of both states have long been typified by a "populist egalitarianism" which created a "great feeling of wanting things to be fair so that everyone could run for office."^[169] As the eventual chief sponsor of the Minnesota legislation, Representative Tom Berg, recalls, his support of the measure was inspired by the "need to level the playing field."^[170]

In Minnesota, a network of legislators and members of Common Cause, the League of Women Voters, and the Joint Religious Legislative Coalition crafted a government reform bill which included public financing of elections in 1972, but failed to secure its passage.^[171] One reason for this was that before 1974 Minnesota elections were non-partisan, resulting in a legislature which was actually far more conservative than the population as a whole.^[172] In 1974 party designations were included on the ballot for the first time, resulting in an overwhelming majority for progressive candidates of the Democratic-Farm-Labor party in the state. The resulting majority, marking the first time in the history of the state that Democratic aligned groups had controlled all branched of government, immediately passed public financing legislation. Wisconsin’s government was similarly dominated by progressive Democrats in 1977.

According to Minnesota Representative Mindy Greiling, in both 1974 and 1993 a consensus among the legislature existed concerning the "long-term chronic [problem of] money controlling votes and agendas."^[173] The question of how to fix this problem was framed by the moralistic culture of the two states. According to fifteen term Minnesota State Representative Phyllis Kahn, consideration of the relatively new and radical approach of public financing became popular because of the "[a]lready generally clean elections and an acceptance of a public role in paying" for public goods.^[174] In 1980, Minnesota even attempted to expand its public financing system to national congressional races in the state, but this initiative was struck down by the federal courts.^[175]

In the 1993 the media attention generated by a recent Minnesota scandal involving illegal phone charges made by state legislators had made government accountability a "big campaign issue" and raised the serious prospect of significant government reform.^[176] In this environment, Common Cause and the League of Women Voters were able to use the scandal to update, expand, and increase the funding for the state’s public financing provision. According to then State Representative and current MN Common Cause Executive Director Marc Asch, constant lobbying by Common Cause and the League of Women Voters raised public financing reform to the top of the agenda of Secretary of State Joan Growe, the State Senate Judiciary Chairman John Marty, and a group of first-term State House Representatives who already had a "strong sense of too many perks for [the] legislature [and the] need to control [the] influence of lobbyists."^[177]

The experiences of Minnesota and Wisconsin, the birthplaces of comprehensive state public financing, seem to bear out the theories of Elazar and Kingdon. Movements for government reform flourished with very little encouragement due to a moralistic consensus view of government generated the dominant Northern European population. The pervasive willingness to embrace innovation within the society meant that public interest groups were able to relatively easily raise public financing to the agenda by attaching the reform to state and national scandals. Legislators then adapted the legislation to fit their sensibilities, sometimes strengthening it in the process.

Maine is characterized by a similar moralistic political culture, though a slightly more ethnically heterogeneous population, than Minnesota and Wisconsin. The state’s adoption of comprehensive public financing provides a useful counterpoint for this study because it occurred in 1996, nearly two decades after the systems in Minnesota and Wisconsin. In addition, Maine was the first state in the country to adopt a truly full public financing system designed to eliminate all private money from the campaigns of participating candidates. Finally, the Maine experience is significant because its system and the direct democracy method of adoption spread rapidly during the later 1990’s in a movement which came to be known as Clean Money.

Maine was one of the first states in the nation to implement a party simple grant public financing measure in 1973, with the stated purpose of "allow[ing] all persons a chance to feel they are participating" in the political process.^[178] However, the system did not greatly affect Maine politics, as the fund’s voluntary tax add-on funding mechanism rarely generated more than $3,000-$4,000 for each party per year.^[179]

Throughout the 1980’s, Maine’s campaign finance reform debate was dominated by the state chapter of Common Cause.^[180] In 1989, Maine Common Cause, inspired by successes in Florida and other states, was able to place a partial public financing measure for statewide offices on the state ballot. Common Cause pursued the campaign on its own with very little money or organizational resources and the ballot measure went down to defeat, 43% to 57%.^[181]

However, by the late 1980’s, a new movement was developing in the Northeast which came to radically change the nature of public financing initiatives. In 1986 a number of veteran activists of the nuclear freeze movement including Randy Kehler, Ben Senturia, Marty Jezer, and a veteran of the Civil Rights movement Gwen Patton, formed the Working Group on Electoral Democracy to develop campaign finance reform proposals more comprehensive than those generally advocated by the traditional advocates of campaign finance reform—Common Cause and the League of Women Voters. In 1991, Janice Fine, an organizer for Northeast Citizen Action, a liberal network founded in 1984 to work on progressive political and labor issues, read a paper by the Working Group at a conference considering third party options in American politics.^[182] Fine was inspired to form a Money and Politics project at Northeast Action, which conducted extensive money in politics research with the Washington DC based Center for Responsive Politics.^[183] Over time, Northeast Action’s project was able to bring the Working Group’s recently issued model full public financing bill to the attention of activists around New England.

Maine seemed to be a promising state for adoption of the new measure because of the recent activity surrounding public financing and its historical willingness to pursue innovative reforms on recycling, taxes, and other measures.^[184] Over the next few years, Northeast Action worked with a handful of Maine activists to form and fund the Maine Citizen Leadership Fund (MCLF) to conduct research on the influence of money in Maine politics. By in large, the early Maine public financing activists seem to be united by an urge to "allow regular people to be able to run for office."^[185] This desire was undoubtedly due in significant degree to the ideal of a citizen legislature which pervaded Maine politics. However, considering the liberal activist backgrounds of the majority of the organizers, this support may also have been inspired by, as one opponent of Public Financing put it, the "belie[f] they could have an easier time recruiting people who agreed with them to run in [the] future."^[186]

The efforts of the Maine activists received a considerable boost in 1992 and 1993 from the negative publicity generated by an unpopular government shutdown confrontation, several wealthy self-funded state senate candidates, and a significant ballot stuffing scandal involving the Speaker of the Maine House which was dubbed Ballotgate by the local press.^[187] According to one of the early Maine reformers, these events "seriously eroded public trust [in government] which had previously been high."^[188] Sensing an opening, the MCLF quickly organized the introduction of full public financing legislation into the Maine House of Representatives, but the bill was swiftly killed by legislative leadership.^[189]

By the mid-1990’s, the Maine Citizen Leadership Fund had fully adapted the Working Group’s model bill to cover all Maine legislative and statewide races and had given it the name Clean Elections. It then began assembling a coalition which soon included the progressive activist organizations Peace Action Maine, The Maine People’s Alliance, The Natural Resources Council of Maine, and the Dirigo Alliance (itself a coalition of labor, environmental, and women’s groups) as well as the traditional reform advocates Common Cause and the League of Women Voters.^[190]

The failure of the 1993 full public financing measure in the legislature was not uncommon. In fact, Maine election reform advocates had experienced very little success in the legislature, securing the passage of only one minor election reform bill in the last ten years. Reform advocates had long since become tired of waiting for "scraps" from the legislature. As the League of Women Voters representative to the nascent coalition recalls, there was soon a "consensus that if we didn’t clamp down on everything at once, the air, like a balloon, would just pop up somewhere else."^[191] Accordingly, in early 1995 supporters made the decision to take a full public financing measure directly to the voters in the 1996 elections through Maine’s ballot initiative process, a strategy which had been pursued successfully by term-limit advocates two years before.

Clean Elections supporters give high marks to the coalitions big tent approach, which expanded the Clean Elections alliance to sixteen organizations by election day, and allowed the campaign to mobilize large numbers of supporters—including a 1,100 volunteer squad which collected the signatures to qualify the measure for the ballot in a single day.^[192] In addition, David Donnelly, the ballot measure campaign manager, emphasizes the effectiveness of the campaigns layered message (outlined above) condemning special interest influence while emphasizing the effects rather than the structure of the "Clean Elections" system.^[193] Finally, supporters cite Maine’s ideal of a citizen legislature, and the state’s proven willingness to make common sense reforms as reasons for the eventual success of the ballot measure, which passed with 56% of the vote in the 1996 election.

Maine’s Clean Elections initiative made considerable waves in the campaign finance reform community. On the strength of Maine’s success, the director of the Washington DC based Center for Responsive Politics, Ellen Miller, and a number of Northeast Action supporters were able to secure the funding to start a national Clean Elections organization, Public Campaign. Furthermore, activists in a number of other New England states sought to work off Maine’s example. In 1997, David Donnelly, the director of Maine’s successful Clean Elections campaign, received funding from Northeast Action to work with Vermont Activist Anthony Pollina and members of Vermont Public Interest Research Group (VPIRG) to develop a Clean Elections proposal for Vermont.^[194] This group quickly organized a lobbying campaign which successfully convinced the Democratic Vermont legislature to pass a full public financing measure for the Governor’s and Lieutenant Governors races, which was eventually signed by the Democratic Governor.

In 1998, the Northeast Action/Public Campaign alliance and David Donnelly were able to form a similar coalition in Massachusetts to that set up in Maine, and successfully ran a ballot campaign which was approved by an over 2-1 ratio. In Arizona, leaders of Common Cause and the League of Women Voters, incensed by "the failure of the legislature to pass a bill that would bar gifts from lobbyists to legislators" declared "enough is enough" and used the Maine strategy to launch a successful Clean Money ballot campaign when a major bribery scandal hit the state.^[195]

The Maine experience further serves to confirm Elazar’s and possibly Hero’s political culture theories. Maine’s moralistic ideal concerning the duty of the community to preserve the traditional ideal of a clean citizen government undoubtedly facilitated the adoption of full public financing. Furthermore, the state’s positive attitude toward innovation may very well have been due to the "low political stakes" preserved by the strikingly low percentage of racial minorities in the population. However, the well-organized Maine ballot initiative coalition and campaign indicate that in states with direct democracy, the agenda generation and determination function can sometimes be controlled by citizen coalitions rather than by more visible political clusters.

Indiana and Ohio implemented political party simple grant public financing systems for relatively similar reasons during the 1980’s. The two mid-western neighbors are classified by Elazar as having purely individualistic political cultures and are both right on the line between Hero’s homogeneous and simple heterogeneous categories (Indiana is barely homogeneous while Ohio is slightly heterogeneous). Corresponding with Elazar’s individualist archetype, the political spheres of both states have been organized largely around political parties defined by large blocks of partisan elites rather than by ideologies or issues.^[196] As a consequence, up until the 1980’s the entire government bureaucracies of both states were staffed largely by political appointees, with the consequence that by any standards agencies were "not well run . . . [and] provided horrible service."^[197] In Indiana, starting in the 1960’s the connection between government jobs and political parties was even more pronounced, as all 36,000 employees of the Indiana state government were expected to contribute 3% of their salaries to the party controlling the governors office, invariably the Republican Party.^[198] The practice was also present in Ohio, though not as widespread.^[199]

Despite the relative weakness of the state chapters of Common Cause and the League of Women Voters during the 1970’s, the political patronage systems of both states became the target of significant criticism after the Watergate scandals.^[200] Citizens were particularly incensed by the mediocre service provided by many state agencies, while good government groups emphasized how the forced contribution system perpetuated one-party Republican dominance.^[201] In 1976, leaders of the political parties in Indiana and Ohio arranged for a more institutionalized system where revenue from license plate charges of the Bureau of Motor Vehicles in both states were distributed more equitably among the political parties.^[202] By most accounts, this ended paycheck deductions in Ohio, though the system survived in Indiana until the inauguration of a Democratic Governor, Evan Bayh, in 1989.^[203]

The swearing in of Ohio Democratic Governor Richard Celeste in 1983 and Indiana Governor Bayh in 1989 ushered in a sea change in the politics of both states and energized attempts to erase all vestiges of long-standing Republican political patronage. In response, the Democratic and Republican parties in both states pushed for more secure forms of public financing.^[204] In Ohio, a political party fund which disbursed equally between the Republicans and Democrats was established through a tax check-off mechanism in 1987.^[205] However, in Indiana, a 1990 proposal attempting to set up a similar system was narrowly defeated by Republicans in the state House of Representatives, and accordingly the revenue from state license plate charges is funneled to the political parties to this day.^[206]

In both states, "good government" groups such as Common Cause and the League of Women Voters actively pursued government reforms during the 1970’s. However, the simple grant provisions of the 1980’s were pursued without significant public attention and the primary entrepreneurs of these measures were the state parties themselves.

New Jersey’s partial public financing system for gubernatorial races was established in the same year as Minnesota’s groundbreaking experiment for legislative elections in 1974. However, New Jersey is among the most ethnically heterogeneous states in the nation. Elazar classifies the state as wholly individualistic, and numerous political observers have commented on New Jersey’s relative lack of a common identity or unifying political culture.

Strangely enough, the very issues causing New Jersey’s confused identity may have combined with institutional factors to create a clear rationale for its public financing system wholly different from the value based grounds used in more moralistic states. The confluence of political circumstances leading to New Jersey’s public financing system begins with the basic structure of its government. The governor’s office is the only statewide elected position in the Garden State, with the governor appointing officials such as the secretary of state and the attorney general and exercising an absolute, conditional, and line-item veto.

The high degree of competition engendered by contests for the most powerful governors office in the nation gives New Jersey elections a particularly complicated and high stakes aspect. However, more subtly, campaigns have historically required greater resources in the Garden State because the structure of the system ensures that few non-incumbents begin the campaign with the name recognition generated from successful past statewide campaigns. Furthermore, the election of governors in odd-numbered years has prevented candidates from benefiting from the attention generated by national campaigns.

New Jersey’s heterogeneous population has prevented the formation of strong statewide party organizations. As a consequence, New Jersey politics are dominated by a balkanized plethora of local county party committees and governing bodies, which are informally identified along ethnic lines as "’Jewish,’ ‘Polish,’ ‘Italian,’ . . . or ‘Irish’ seats."^[207] Because of this fractured political structure, the frequently unknown statewide candidates rarely are nominated with a unified party behind them, and generally come to rely on media advertising to make a name for themselves and generate support.^[208]

Unfortunately, New Jersey’s location creates an extremely expensive media market. Sandwiched between the New York City and Philadelphia media markets, New Jersey only gained its first small television station in the 1980’s.^[209] New Jersey’s radio and print media are dominated only slightly less markedly by out of state organs. Correspondingly, the media advertisements which became the staple of statewide campaigns in the late 1960’s and 1970’s posed a peculiar problem for New Jersey politicians. Thus, because of New Jersey’s distinctive structure of government, ethnically divided politics, and location between New York City and Philadelphia, campaigns for New Jersey governor were already some of the "most expensive in the nation" during the early 1970’s.^[210]

Despite these tendencies, it was "a ‘double hit’ of national and state scandal" which created a window for public financing.^[211] As the Watergate investigation heated up in Washington, a massive campaign fundraising scandal hit the administration of incumbent Republican Governor William Cahill, which eventually resulted in the indictment of his Secretary of State, Treasurer, chief fundraiser, and numerous campaign operatives.^[212] The combined national and state scandal made corruption a major issue in the 1973 New Jersey gubernatorial campaign and brought to power an unknown Democratic prosecutor Brendan Byrne.

A New Jersey Common Cause chapter did not formally exist at the time. However, a group of Common Cause affiliated activists sensed an opportunity and gained the new Governor’s support for a bill modeled closely on the national matching funds system being considered for Presidential primaries.^[213] Because of its ethnic diversity, New Jersey has historically had a relatively liberal legislature willing to embrace interventionist social and economic policies. Thus, with the new Governor’s support, the public financing bill was swiftly passed in the legislature, likely because of "exasperation of many politicians at raising huge amounts of money to spend on media which was mainly seen by out of state voters."^[214]

Evidence seems to indicate that the New Jersey gubernatorial public financing system may have been facilitated by significant public scandal, but was largely embraced by a liberal political elite as an attempt to solve a severe and chronic structural annoyance in the New Jersey political system. In some ways, the very success of the system indicates its non-ideological nature. The Garden State’s public financing system remains one of the best funded in the nation, and continues to enjoy a strikingly high participation rate from Democrats and Republican’s alike.^[215]

The adoption of public financing in Florida is striking because it came as the state transitioned from a traditionalist southern bifurcated political culture into a more heterogeneous and individualistic state on the Middle Atlantic model. Over half of Florida’s population at the time of the adoption of public financing in 1985 had immigrated into the state in the last fifteen years.^[216] The Florida legislature also was the scene of significant upheaval during the 1980’s, as a majority of representatives became "out-of-staters," even as the leadership positions continued to be occupied by senior "porkchopper" Democrats.^[217]

It was in the midst of this upheaval in 1985 that the new Speaker of the Florida House James Herald Thompson, a long time white representative from a very poor and highly African American district, decided he wanted to do something to allow poorer Floridians to run for state-wide office.^[218] Thompson, retired since 1986, describes himself as a true "Southern Democrat," but with a deeply ingrained "populist" streak which made him desire "an alternative to help people of average means to run" for office.^[219] Thompson handed the issue off to a trusted aide, an African American, who decided to propose a public financing system since it seemed "necessary to elect blacks statewide."^[220]

Florida Common Cause was taken totally by surprise when a crude public financing bill showed up in a committee of the state legislature.^[221] The organization had been pushing a matching grant partial public financing system for a number of years, but had never made much headway in the conservative Florida legislature. Bill Jones, the executive director of Common Cause Florida at the time, raced over to the capitol, and was able to add many aspects of the Common Cause proposal into the newly introduced bill after a number of days of negotiation.^[222]

As the session wound down, James Herald Thompson used the power of the Speakers office to guide the bill through the House. As Thompson explains, "once you are Speaker you generally get to have your own way."^[223] However, the State Senate proved a much tougher challenge. On the final day of the session, the bill seemed to be lost to procedural hurdles. However, Bill Jones and the Head of the Florida AFL-CIO were able to orchestrate a small rebellion among rank and file senators, two-thirds of whom were born out-of-state, by arguing that the bill was important for African Americans and for Labor.^[224] In the closing hours of the session the bill was passed by the Senate and signed by Democratic Governor Bob Graham.

Common Cause played a much more direct role in initiating a major solidification of Florida’s public financing system in 1991. Because Florida had no income tax during the 1980’s, the partial public financing system depended on legislative appropriation. However, the public financing system had not been funded since Thompson had retired from the legislature in 1986.

Unsupportive leadership in the legislature and a Republican Governor had prevented meaningful action to fund the system during the later 1980’s. However, in 1990, a scandal and a distinctive election campaign created a window for Common Cause, which had since been joined by the state League of Women Voters. The emerging scandal involved illegal state-funded trips made by a number of members of the legislature and resulted in the indictment of fourteen House members and threatened to engulf the sitting speaker, T.K. Wetherell, himself. After some negotiation, Common Cause and its supporting organizations agreed to reduce the heat on Wetherell by publicly working with him to draft a new stringent state Ethics Law, in exchange for his support of a permanent funding mechanism for Thompson’s public financing system.^[225]

Partially due to the focus on corruption, in 1990 the state Democratic party nominated an energetic populist for governor, former Senator Lawton Chiles, who walked across the state and refused to accept donations larger than $100 (at that time Florida’s contribution limit was $3000). Once in office, Chiles readily agreed to sign a bill crafted by Common Cause which provided secure funding for the public financing system while also lowering the contribution limit to $500, one of Chiles’ long-standing goals.^[226]

Florida’s experience shows that in certain circumstances Southern populism can lead to egalitarian impetuses similar to northern moralism. However, Florida’s distinctive population transition during the 1980’s and 1990’s undoubtedly played a major part in securing its public financing system. The roles of the major actors correspond to Kingdon’s suppositions, with the more visible clusters affecting the agenda, while the less visible public interest groups played a decisive role in specifying and lobbying for a specific policy alternative. Leading up to the 1991 reforms, the political agenda was determined by a series of focusing events, while public interest groups continued to play an alternative specification and lobbying role.

Kentucky political culture presents an interesting mix of Southern attitudes. Elazar classifies the state as largely traditionalist, and indeed the attitude of Kentuckians toward politics seems to bear this out this stereotype of hierarchy. As Marc Landy, a native academic observer of Kentucky culture comments, "[m]ost Kentuckians are not politically active, they do little more than vote [but] among the minority of those more deeply involved in politics, an unusual air of collegiality exists . . . be they Republicans or Democrats . . . [they] know and talk to one another."^[227] Unlike its Southern cousins, Kentucky is also very homogeneous, with only tiny minority and white ethnic populations. Perhaps this homogeneity helps to foster a quite distinctive sense of pride and state identity, revolving around the much beloved Wildcats college basketball team and the metaphorical image of genteel bluegrass living.^[228] Similar to New Jersey, most Kentucky politics revolves around the state-wide level. County and local governments are weak and impoverished while state legislators "do not disdain to engage in graft."^[229] Accordingly, a "special degree of respect and deference [is directed toward] Kentucky’s first citizen, the governor," and for many, this "reverence . . . reflects the love borne toward [the state] itself."^[230] Interestingly, it is most likely the distinctive symbolic nature of the governors office which allowed a system of public financing for gubernatorial elections to pass through the legislature in Frankfort.

Richard Beliles and Common Cause Kentucky had spent much of the 1980’s lobbying for a public financing measure which would limit "the egregious amount of spending" in Kentucky elections.^[231] At the time, "Kentucky election finance laws [were] not terribly effective" and it was thus common practice "for industries to make enormous campaign contributions to gubernatorial candidates."^[232] Kentucky Common Cause published a number of studies during the late 1980’s profiling the links between contributions to gubernatorial campaigns and service contracts conferred by the state. In the late 1980’s, Beliles made the decision to limit the public financing proposal’s scope to the governors race since the special reverence Kentuckians held for the office could potentially be piqued by campaign finance revelations.^[233]

Beliles, who eventually enlisted the support of the Kentucky League of Women Voters, was very successful in directing attention to his proposal. The state media, largely based in Louisville—a river haven of German-Americans culturally quite distinct from the rest of the state—portrayed Common Cause’s plan as a battle with Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, an outspoken opponent of campaign finance reform and a polarizing figure in Kentucky politics.^[234] The perceived confrontation with McConnell may have helped the proposal’s prospects in the Democratic controlled Kentucky legislature, and by 1992 Beliles had lined up sufficient support to secure the bills passage. Senator McConnell launched a last minute lobbying campaign to defeat the measure. However, his efforts were undermined by a propitiously timed Louisville media story which exposed illegal contributions and bribes paid by Kentucky’s horse industry in exchange for legislation, and inspired talk of wide-ranging ethics legislation next session.^[235]

The horse industry corruption and previous smaller scandals may have created an interest in government reform policies in the commonwealth. However, evidence indicates that Kentucky Common Cause played a decisive role in securing the passage of a public financing bill for gubernatorial elections. Kentucky’s experience seems to prove that moralistic political culture, or even significant populist sentiments, are not always necessary to secure limited public financing for statewide offices.

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