The Impact of Public Financing on Electoral Competition: Evidence from Arizona and Maine

Does complete public financing of campaigns enhance electoral competition? Arizona and Maine implemented similar clean elections programs for state-level races in 2000, providing an opportunity to examine the consequences of public financing. Employing two measures of competitiveness, I find that clean elections programs in both states significantly increased competition in districts where challengers accepted public funding. These findings suggest that public monies do not simply attract lowquality challengers and that access to campaign funds is an important determinant of competitiveness. As a result, while public financing programs are not panaceas for uncompetitive elections, such programs can enhance competition in races where money is accepted. for over thirty years, advocates of government reform have pushed for public financing of elections in the United States in hopes of reducing the influence of money in American politics. Clean elections laws at the state and local level generally allow candidates to use taxpayer dollars to fund their campaigns in exchange for accepting spending limits and forgoing private contributions. Supporters of public financing present two broad benefits of such laws. First, they argue that public financing reduces both the amount of money that individual candidates need to raise from outside interest groups and the overall level of campaign expenditures (Center for Governmental Studies 2003). In principle, officials elected under clean elections programs would not need to dole out favors to pay back their supporters and would instead pass legislation designed to aid the public interest, not special interests. Further, candidates free from fundraising duties presumably would have more time to devote to their responsibilities as elected officials. A second purported benefit of public financing is that clean elections SPPQ 8_3.indd 263 7/8/08 9:34:51 AM laws level the playing field of the campaign, resulting in more competitive elections (Center for Governmental Studies 2003). By reducing the disparity in the amount of money incumbents and challengers are able to raise, public financing laws aim to prevent incumbents from becoming entrenched in government bodies. As a result, clean elections laws might not only reduce the number of uncontested seats, but also increase the chances of challengers winning races in which incumbents have structural advantages. Although the rhetoric of public financing advocates is loud and clear, the true effect of public financing laws is less transparent. Evidence exists that clean elections laws affect the fundraising behavior of candidates for public office and reduce the overall amount of dollars raised, part of the first goal mentioned above. Francia and Herrnson (2003) found that candidates who accept full public funding spend less time raising money than candidates who have to raise money via private contributions. Mayer and Wood (1995) found that partial public funding in Minnesota reduced the overall level of election spending. Nonetheless, the impact of public financing on the competitiveness of elections, the second goal mentioned above, is not as straightforward. Although public financing might strengthen the ability of challengers to obtain resources, it does not necessarily increase their chance of winning. In fact, the hurdles to qualify for public financing are sufficiently low that many challengers attracted by clean elections programs could be low-quality candidates. Donnay and Ramsden (1995) found that a partial public financing system in Wisconsin did not encourage challengers to enter state legislative contests, nor did it boost the competitiveness of contested races. Mayer and Wood (1995) reached similar findings in their analysis of Minnesota’s partial public financing scheme. Yet, both Wisconsin and Minnesota allow candidates to receive a mixture of public and private funding. Perhaps public financing plans that fully subsidize elections have a greater impact on competitiveness since they provide more support to challengers. On the other hand, full funding might actually attract lower-quality challengers, who are unable to raise money on their own. Only two states have offered complete public financing of state legislative campaigns for multiple election cycles: Arizona and Maine. As explained further below, both states offer full funding to the campaigns of candidates who are able to raise small qualifying sums. In exchange, candidates who opt into the system agree not to raise private monies. Clean elections laws were approved via referenda by voters in Maine and Arizona in 1996 and 1998, respectively, and went into effect during the 2000 election cycle. In this article, I analyze the impact of public financing laws on competitiveness in state legislative elections in these two states. In doing so, I assess whether 264 malhotra SPPQ 8_3.indd 264 7/8/08 9:34:51 AM fall 2008 / state politics and policy quarterly 265 complete public financing of elections actually does make elections more competitive, a major argument of the advocates of clean elections laws. State legislative elections in Arizona (1992–2000) and Maine (1994–2002) provide opportunities to study the effects of public financing on competitiveness. In Arizona, the 1992–1998 elections took place before the clean elections law was implemented and the 2000 election took place after its implementation. In Maine, the 1994–1998 elections occurred before the presence of clean elections, and the 2000 and 2002 elections occurred afterwards. Most importantly, all elections took place after the post-1990 redistricting and before the post-2000 redistricting; new district lines went into effect in 2002 in Arizona and 2004 in Maine. Although there were political and demographic changes between the two elections, the primary institutional difference was the presence of clean elections laws. Therefore, these two states provide relatively clean tests of the influence of public policies on election outcomes, thereby avoiding the pitfalls of pooling races from different redistricting cycles. Further, the tests ascertain whether public financing laws were powerful enough to overcome other, unobservable changes that occurred. As discussed below, I only examine Senate elections in both states in order to obtain an accurate measure of challenger quality. Although several other works have addressed the Arizona and Maine clean elections laws, few academic studies have been published analyzing the effect of the programs on competition in legislative races. Francia and Herrnson (2003) studied the effect of public financing on the amount of time candidates spent fundraising, but they did not analyze the impact on competitiveness. Daniel (2001) found that more candidates ran in Arizona’s legislative races following the implementation of the public financing system. The Government Accountability Office (2003) issued a report to Congress concluding that the Arizona and Maine public financing laws had minimal impacts on competitiveness. Finally, Mayer, Werner, and Williams (2006) reported mixed evidence showing increases in competitiveness in the lower chambers. But there are two main problems with the methodologies of existing studies. First, the extant literature does not utilize multivariate regression techniques to isolate the impact of clean elections, controlling for other important determinants of competition such as incumbency and challenger quality. Second, existing studies examine all districts after the implementation of public financing, instead of only those in which challengers actually participated in the program. Comparing Arizona and Maine also allows an assessment of how sensitive campaign finance regulations are to differing pre-existing institutional structures. The procedures of the public financing systems are similar in both states and a similar percentage of candidates opted into the programs (31 percent SPPQ 8_3.indd 265 7/8/08 9:34:51 AM in Maine and 25 percent in Arizona) (Sanchez 2001). Nonetheless, the legislative and electoral institutions in the two states significantly differ. Arizona’s legislature is more professional than Maine’s, and compared to Maine’s legislators, Arizonan legislators earn $14,000 more per year and have access to over three-and-a-half times as many staff (National Conference of State Legislatures 2003). District size also varies substantially across the sample of electoral bodies. Arizona’s Senate districts contain roughly 170,000 people, whereas Maine’s Senate districts contain approximately 36,000 people. I cannot estimate the independent effects of particular institutional differences on the effectiveness of clean elections laws with only two data points, but the inclusion of the two states does test if the impact of full public financing systems is robust to institutional differences. This article is organized as follows: In the first section, I describe in detail the public financing and electoral systems of Arizona and Maine, as well as a discussion of the relevant literature on electoral competition. The second section provides an overview of the data and methods used to assess the impact of the public financing systems in the two states. The results of the analyses are in the third section, and the final section discusses implications and presents potential extensions.