It has come to my attention that some people continue to be concerned about issues relating to campaign spending, such as detrimental effects of Citizens United v. FEC, in which the Court held that 2 US Code §441b (§203 of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act) prohibiting expenditures from the general treasuries of corporations and unions for independent electioneering communications prior to federal elections is an unconstitutional infringement of strictly protected political speech. It isn't uncommon to hear the claim that “elections are bought,” which I asked about on a thread started last year (What Is the Process by which Elections Are Bought?) where no one admitted that his/her vote had ever changed or had been improperly influenced by a paid advertisement. The OP of that thread cites several facts that contradict the proposition that the larger amount of money spent by or for a candidate determines the winner--e.g., Jeb Bush's enormous war chest in the 2016 primaries did not “buy” the Republican nomination for him. In New Hampshire, for instance, Bush spent $34 million, which secured him 4th place and only 11% of the Republican votes. In contrast, Trump got the largest portion of votes with campaign disbursements of only $3 million.
That OP quotes from an article by economics professor Jeffrey Milyo in The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics in which he notes that “[m]ost systematic studies . . . find no effect of marginal campaign spending on the electoral success of candidates.”
Also cited in that OP is a recent meta-analysis, spanning 2,000 elections from 1974-2007, that found differential effects of spending for incumbents and challengers: In House races, “for every additional $100,000 that an incumbent spends, the challenger will gain 0.1292 percent of the vote share, and for every additional $100,000 the challenger spends he/she will gain 1.3099 percent of the vote share.” Accordingly, governmental efforts to equalize campaign expenditures only disadvantage challengers while benefiting incumbents, apparently due to factors such as name recognition of the incumbent and limiting the challenger's ability to criticize the incumbent's performance or to broadcast his/her own message.
A seemingly important 2013 study by U Mass political science professors Raymond La Raja and Brian Schaffner, The Effects of Campaign Finance Spending Bans on Electoral Outcomes: Evidence From the States about the Potential Impact of Citizens United v. FEC, began by collecting data on campaign finance laws governing elections in each state from 1968 to 2008. This period entailed 19 corporate or corporate/union spending bans enacted by states, for which the authors examined the effects on 4 outcomes: (1) the proportion of legislative seats won by Republicans in a particular election; (2) the proportion of the total vote won by Republicans in state legislative races; (3) the proportion of incumbents who won re-election; and (4) the proportion of the total legislative vote won by incumbents.
The findings were almost always null, with the rare instances of statistically significant differences being uniformly small:
The authors briefly discuss the interesting issue of the “national policy mood” variable measured in their analysis. “Mood” or “electorate mood” is a concept introduced by professor James Stimson in his 1991 book Public opinion in America : moods, cycles, and swings. It is “a weighted composite of virtually all available polls on domestic policy issues [that] measures the liberalism-conservatism of public policy preferences in the U.S., starting in the year 1952.” La Raja and Schaffner inform us that the “mood variable captures the extent to which the American public supports more liberal or conservative government programs and it has been shown to play an important role in explaining election outcomes (Erikson, MacKuen, and Stimson 2002). We include the measure in our state-level models to control for any partisan swings in the states that may occur simply because of a shifting policy mood.” It would be misguided, though perhaps not uncommon, to attribute undesired election outcomes to the sinister contrivances of corporate spending or advertizing when they actually just reflect a mood swing in the electorate.
La Raja and Schaffner also point to a large body of research showing “that while campaign spending does affect electoral outcomes, the effect of each additional dollar spent on an election tends to have a diminishing return in terms of the outcome.” They illustrate with the 2010 Congressional election results: the first $250,000 spent by either candidate has a strong effect on the election result, but after each candidate has spent about $1 million, spending has almost no influence on determining the winner. (And evidently much more than $1 million was spent by/for each candidate.) The authors note that these diminishing returns provide good reason to doubt that unlimited independent expenditures by corporations and unions will have a major impact on elections. They explain that corporations and unions are most likely to spend on close races where there appears to be a better chance of tipping the scale in favor of their preferred candidate. But it is precisely these competitive races where large sums will be or have already been spent by and for these candidates, thus nullifying the effect of their spending.
A study by John Coleman and Paul Manna examined the 1994 and 1996 House of Representatives elections to determine the consequences of campaign spending on such issues as public trust and involvement, and constituents' knowledge of the candidates. In a 2003 briefing paper for Cato Institute, Coleman expounds upon their findings as well as those of a couple of other studies, noting, “Studies indicate that campaign spending does not diminish trust, efficacy, and involvement, contrary to what critics charge. Moreover, spending increases public knowledge of the candidates, across essentially all groups in the population.”
Finally, it seems to me that the billions upon billions of dollars spent in the US on the continuous cycles of elections is surely an important economic driver (at least during election years) and an efficient method of redistributing wealth. Many of the very wealthy (e.g., TV and movie stars, in addition to corporate giants) are willing to shell out huge sums in hopes of electing their preferred candidate. This money makes its way into the pockets of the owners and employees of all manner of small and medium-size businesses--caterers, venue owners and their minimum-wage employees, IT techs, administrative staff, newspapers, TV stations, website owners, etc., etc. It isn't necessarily a praiseworthy product, but at least it puts people to work. The biggest threat to this system of wealth redistribution is that celebrities, corporations and unions may become wise to the fact that it generally doesn't work. Regardless of how popular the belief is, you can't buy an election.
So, are your views on campaign spending premised on evidence or facts that you can substantiate? If so, please cite that evidence, or state and substantiate those facts.
That OP quotes from an article by economics professor Jeffrey Milyo in The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics in which he notes that “[m]ost systematic studies . . . find no effect of marginal campaign spending on the electoral success of candidates.”
Also cited in that OP is a recent meta-analysis, spanning 2,000 elections from 1974-2007, that found differential effects of spending for incumbents and challengers: In House races, “for every additional $100,000 that an incumbent spends, the challenger will gain 0.1292 percent of the vote share, and for every additional $100,000 the challenger spends he/she will gain 1.3099 percent of the vote share.” Accordingly, governmental efforts to equalize campaign expenditures only disadvantage challengers while benefiting incumbents, apparently due to factors such as name recognition of the incumbent and limiting the challenger's ability to criticize the incumbent's performance or to broadcast his/her own message.
A seemingly important 2013 study by U Mass political science professors Raymond La Raja and Brian Schaffner, The Effects of Campaign Finance Spending Bans on Electoral Outcomes: Evidence From the States about the Potential Impact of Citizens United v. FEC, began by collecting data on campaign finance laws governing elections in each state from 1968 to 2008. This period entailed 19 corporate or corporate/union spending bans enacted by states, for which the authors examined the effects on 4 outcomes: (1) the proportion of legislative seats won by Republicans in a particular election; (2) the proportion of the total vote won by Republicans in state legislative races; (3) the proportion of incumbents who won re-election; and (4) the proportion of the total legislative vote won by incumbents.
The findings were almost always null, with the rare instances of statistically significant differences being uniformly small:
Overall, there is little in the way of consistent evidence that spending bans produce any partisan bias in election outcomes for state legislature.
[. . . ]
. . . .there is not a single state in which the introduction of a corporate spending ban produced a statistically significant increase or decrease in the Republican share of the vote for state legislature.
[. . . ]
Overall, the results from our models indicate that corporate spending bans have little effect on who wins elections (at least when the “who” is defined by incumbency or partisanship). Republicans did not fare worse in elections following the implementation of a corporate spending ban, the corollary of course being that they did not perform better when such a ban did not exist. Likewise, incumbent re-election rates did not decrease when a corporate spending ban was enacted.
[. . . ]
. . . .there is not a single state in which the introduction of a corporate spending ban produced a statistically significant increase or decrease in the Republican share of the vote for state legislature.
[. . . ]
Overall, the results from our models indicate that corporate spending bans have little effect on who wins elections (at least when the “who” is defined by incumbency or partisanship). Republicans did not fare worse in elections following the implementation of a corporate spending ban, the corollary of course being that they did not perform better when such a ban did not exist. Likewise, incumbent re-election rates did not decrease when a corporate spending ban was enacted.
The authors briefly discuss the interesting issue of the “national policy mood” variable measured in their analysis. “Mood” or “electorate mood” is a concept introduced by professor James Stimson in his 1991 book Public opinion in America : moods, cycles, and swings. It is “a weighted composite of virtually all available polls on domestic policy issues [that] measures the liberalism-conservatism of public policy preferences in the U.S., starting in the year 1952.” La Raja and Schaffner inform us that the “mood variable captures the extent to which the American public supports more liberal or conservative government programs and it has been shown to play an important role in explaining election outcomes (Erikson, MacKuen, and Stimson 2002). We include the measure in our state-level models to control for any partisan swings in the states that may occur simply because of a shifting policy mood.” It would be misguided, though perhaps not uncommon, to attribute undesired election outcomes to the sinister contrivances of corporate spending or advertizing when they actually just reflect a mood swing in the electorate.
La Raja and Schaffner also point to a large body of research showing “that while campaign spending does affect electoral outcomes, the effect of each additional dollar spent on an election tends to have a diminishing return in terms of the outcome.” They illustrate with the 2010 Congressional election results: the first $250,000 spent by either candidate has a strong effect on the election result, but after each candidate has spent about $1 million, spending has almost no influence on determining the winner. (And evidently much more than $1 million was spent by/for each candidate.) The authors note that these diminishing returns provide good reason to doubt that unlimited independent expenditures by corporations and unions will have a major impact on elections. They explain that corporations and unions are most likely to spend on close races where there appears to be a better chance of tipping the scale in favor of their preferred candidate. But it is precisely these competitive races where large sums will be or have already been spent by and for these candidates, thus nullifying the effect of their spending.
A study by John Coleman and Paul Manna examined the 1994 and 1996 House of Representatives elections to determine the consequences of campaign spending on such issues as public trust and involvement, and constituents' knowledge of the candidates. In a 2003 briefing paper for Cato Institute, Coleman expounds upon their findings as well as those of a couple of other studies, noting, “Studies indicate that campaign spending does not diminish trust, efficacy, and involvement, contrary to what critics charge. Moreover, spending increases public knowledge of the candidates, across essentially all groups in the population.”
Finally, it seems to me that the billions upon billions of dollars spent in the US on the continuous cycles of elections is surely an important economic driver (at least during election years) and an efficient method of redistributing wealth. Many of the very wealthy (e.g., TV and movie stars, in addition to corporate giants) are willing to shell out huge sums in hopes of electing their preferred candidate. This money makes its way into the pockets of the owners and employees of all manner of small and medium-size businesses--caterers, venue owners and their minimum-wage employees, IT techs, administrative staff, newspapers, TV stations, website owners, etc., etc. It isn't necessarily a praiseworthy product, but at least it puts people to work. The biggest threat to this system of wealth redistribution is that celebrities, corporations and unions may become wise to the fact that it generally doesn't work. Regardless of how popular the belief is, you can't buy an election.
So, are your views on campaign spending premised on evidence or facts that you can substantiate? If so, please cite that evidence, or state and substantiate those facts.
