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

2. Strategic Candidates and Public Funding

2 Strategic Candidates and Public Funding In our search for the effects of public funding, the first step is to recognize that participation is likely to change the strategic considerations that candidates make since it dramatically affects the costs—in several areas—that they must pay to wage a viable campaign. The recognition of this dynamic is important because an altered cost-benefit calculus will almost certainly affect what candidates think and do during the course of an election. Indeed, if public funding leads to broader shifts in electoral competition or interest group influence, these changes are likely to be the result of altered strategy and candidate behavior. Or as one Arizona legislator noted, “When people think of Clean Elections, they’re thinking of it as keeping out special interests and...leveling the playing field. But I think if there’s a nuance that the general public misses, it’s the campaign strategy that comes into Clean Elections.” Broadly, candidates who opt out of public funding are most likely to do so if they have ideological objections to the program or relatively low fundraising costs in a traditionally funded campaign. Those who choose 30 Subsidizing Democracy to participate in public funding programs do so when they determine either that accepting subsidies will lower their fundraising costs or that public funding will enhance their chances of victory. Significantly, these terms will be most affected for candidates lacking political experience and correspondent access to funding networks. Thus, it is reasonable to expect the campaigns of publicly funded candidates to be very different from those of their traditionally financed counterparts. Clean Elections candidates in particular should find themselves in a better financial position than they otherwise would have been. Equally as important, the acceptance of full funding allows them to solve a crucial problem that exists for candidates in traditionally financed elections: the struggle to allocate time between raising money and turning out votes via personal interaction with citizens. Compared with even partially funded programs, the effects of Clean Elections funding on the decisions of strategic candidates should be stark, as fully funded programs hold vast potential to affect not only the financial dynamics of a race but also the manner in which candidates use their time. Why Take Public Funding? When we consider the strategic decisions that candidates make when they weigh whether to accept Clean Elections subsidies, the calculus of candidate entry provides a useful starting point. Black’s (1972) classic formal entry model portrays prospective candidates as strategic actors whose entry decision is a function of campaign utility. Simply put, Black’s model predicts that if the candidate judges the benefits of an office combined with the probability of winning it as exceeding the costs of running, she will run. Subsequent research has incorporated and extended Black’s calculus ; most has focused on the “probability of victory” component of Black’s model, and has found that strategic candidates are less likely to enter when the chances of winning are low (e.g., Lazarus 2008; Maestas et al. 2006; Maisel and Stone 1997). Additional work has considered the effect of the marginal benefit of a higher office as it relates to progressive political ambition (Stone et al. 2004). Campaign costs have received comparatively little attention in the discussion of the entry calculus. In a notable exception, Dowling (2011), who studied gubernatorial elections, expanded the cost component of Black’s Strategic Candidates and Public Funding 31 model, differentiating between “personal” and “institutional” costs of running. Dowling suggested that the availability of public funding should reduce costs and encourage candidate entry, but he found evidence that public funding encouraged the entry of only incumbent-party candidates in open-seat contests. Dowling’s detection of such limited effects could be a result of the generally high level of quality typical of a major-party gubernatorial candidate; it seems reasonable to assume that many of the candidates in Dowling’s study had a great deal of political experience, and that their perceived “institutional” costs may have been relatively low due to easier access to donor bases and networks. I argue that for candidates contemplating an entry-level election, and particularly for those who lack political experience, public funding poses a greater potential to affect the utility calculus. As races become more expensive, candidates must pay higher costs in both money and time. For instance, Steen (2006...