The States of Campaign Finance Reform

The States of Campaign Finance Reform provides the most comprehensive and methodologically sophisticated analysis of state campaign finance laws to date. Utilizing two decades’ worth of gubernatorial campaign finance data across the fifty states, The States of Campaign Finance Reform breaks new ground in the debate over campaign reform and, in doing so, challenges the assumptions of both reformers and their critics. Since 1974, the vast majority of the research on campaign finance has focused on U.S. national elections. As a result, our understanding of the electoral consequences of campaign finance laws has been largely (though not entirely) limited to a single regulatory regime—the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 and its subsequent amendments. This book bridges these gaps by focusing on the impact of state campaign finance laws on candidate spending, voter turnout, and electoral competition in gubernatorial elections.