Subsidizing Democracy: How Public Funding Changes Elections and How It Can Work in the Future

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments This book began as a research project in the Department of Government at Cornell University, and though I swore to never think about it again when I finished, here we are. I am extremely pleased that the book has returned “home” to Cornell University Press for its publication, since the Cornell community was so important to its development. Suffice it to say that this book was a long time in the making, and I have accordingly incurred a long list of people who were integral in producing it. Nonetheless , it goes without saying that while the people named below made the project possible, the responsibility for all errors or omissions, should they present themselves herein, rests solely with me. I know that it is customary for reasons of convention or style to acknowledge one’s professional debts first and familial debts second, but I cannot in good conscience follow that template. I went to graduate school at the urging of my best friend and spouse, Laura Miller, who recognized that the academic life was the only one that would give me a sense of proper place. Without her constant support and willingness to uproot our family x Acknowledgments (three times), none of this would have been possible. My children, Carli, Landon, and Ava, have also borne some cost along the way. Most of these words were written with a child under my chair, and I fear that I have said the woeful phrase “just a second” a few too many times during the process. I thank them for their patience. Finally, my mother, JoAnn Miller, and father , Gary Miller, have been unwavering in their support of this and all my endeavors, and their willingness to indulge my intellectual curiosity from a young age placed me on this path. For my family’s separate and collective sacrifices on my behalf, I am endlessly grateful. Walter R. Mebane Jr. deserves to be at the top of the list as well. I went to Cornell to work with Walter because I believed that his scholarship was the finest example of rigorous quantitative political science on substantive topics that mattered. The intervening years have not only deepened this belief but have also yielded crucial lessons about the huge investment that a good mentor is willing to make in his students. Walter ably guided the project from pilot to completion, reading and rereading chapter drafts, and it seemed he was always a step ahead of me. It still seems that way. This book would not have happened without Walter’s guidance. I owe him a bottomless debt that I will most assuredly pay forward, and I am proud to call him my friend. I am also deeply grateful to others at Cornell, each of whom provided crucial guidance: Theodore J. Lowi, Suzanne Mettler, Peter Enns, and Christopher Anderson. I also thank Sherry Martin, who helped to shape the project at its formative stages during two graduate seminars, as well as my fellow Cornell graduate students for friendship, support, and commiseration throughout the writing process. The National Science Foundation was kind enough to fund the bulk of this project via a Dissertation Improvement Grant (SES-0819060), and where necessary, the Department of Government (via the personal generosity of Professors Mebane and Lowi) and the Department of American Studies at Cornell took up the financial slack. Judy Virgilio and Jackie Pastore were instrumental in helping to prepare the NSF grant application , which Laurie Coon ably administered. It is not a stretch to say that this project would never have been possible without the generosity of these benefactors, particularly the NSF. Their funding allowed for the fieldwork and data collection described herein, much of which was aided by what came to be called “Team America,” a dedicated group of undergraduate research assistants at Cornell who worked tirelessly on data collection Acknowledgments xi in 2007 and/or 2008: Erin Nuzzo, Tom Hudson, Zach Newkirk, Rebecca Dittrich, Chris Martin, Ben Gitlin, and Rob Morissey. Parts of Chapter 7 originally appeared as an article in the July 2008 issue of PS: Political Science and Politics, and I thank Cambridge University Press for allowing it to reappear here. The Graduate School and the Department of Government also funded travel to a number of conferences at which this research was presented, critiqued, and subsequently improved. Various components of this book or its pilot study appeared at meetings of...