Campaign Finance Reform at the State Level

Should restrictions on campaign financing in the United States be laissez-faire or stringent? This debate has been had at levels as high as the Supreme Court and as wide as the legislative chambers of all fifty states. This paper aims to create a broader understanding of campaign finance reform at the state level. Specifically, this paper analyzes state-level data on campaign finance reform adoption, educational attainment, and partisan lean to determine the strength of correlations between these variables. Additionally, this paper utilizes expert knowledge gained through interviews focused on campaign finance reform with a former FPPC chair and a California Mayor. The quantitative, data-driven findings of this paper suggest that campaign finance reform is only weakly correlated with Democratic lean and even less so with educational attainment, meanwhile, both independent variables were highly correlated with each other. These quantitative results run contrary to the paper’s hypotheses, which suggest that both independent variables, Democratic lean and educational attainment, would be strongly correlated with strong campaign finance reforms. These results indicate that the tested variables are not strong predictors of the direction of campaign finance reform in a given state, and further research will be needed to investigate the factors influencing whether a state implements strong or weak campaign finance reforms. The qualitative, expert interview driven findings of this paper suggest some answers to the questions created by the quantitative findings. Both experts opined that the tested variables may have some relationship with campaign finance reform adoption, however, they saw other factors as more likely to be controlling. The experts suggested that the more powerful factors determining whether a state legislates campaign finance reform are pressures from minority parties within states, the beliefs of prominent statewide candidates on the issue, and the popularity of reform. Undoubtedly, more research is needed to expand the breadth of knowledge and explain why some states implement stronger campaign finance laws than others.