Campaign finance vouchers do not reduce donor inequality

Yorgason, Chenoa

doi:10.31235/osf.io/76mjp

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 37 publications

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“…McCabe and Heerwig (2019) examine demographic changes in the donor pool resulting from the program and find that when vouchers were available, the donor pool moved closer to being demographically representative of the electorate. By contrast, Yorgason (2021) finds that voucher availability made the donor pool less representative of the electorate. The most closely related paper is Griffith and Noonen (2022), which uses difference‐in‐differences to study Democracy Vouchers' effects on campaign finance outcomes.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Do Democracy Vouchers help democracy?

Papich

2023

Contemporary Economic Policy

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Seattle's Democracy Vouchers program provides a unique form of public financing for political campaigns in which voters decide how to allocate public funding across candidates. This paper is the first to study the effects of public financing for political campaigns on political participation. I estimate that the Democracy Vouchers program increases voter turnout by 4.9 percentage points, suggesting that public financing programs can increase political participation. I also find that campaigns become more reliant on small contributions. For city council candidates, dollars from small contributions under $100 increase by 156% while dollars from large contributions over $250 decrease by 93%.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Do Democracy Vouchers help democracy?

Papich

2023

Contemporary Economic Policy

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Campaign Finance

Weschle

2023

Studies in Public Choice

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Did private election administration funding advantage Democrats in 2020?

Lal,

Thompson

2024

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Private donors contributed more than $350 million to local election officials to support the administration of the 2020 election. Supporters argue these grants were neutral and necessary to maintain normal election operations during the pandemic, while critics worry these grants mostly went to Democratic strongholds and tilted election outcomes. How much did these grants shape the 2020 presidential election? To answer this question, we collect administrative data on private election administration grants and election outcomes. We then use advances in synthetic control methods to compare presidential election results and turnout in counties that received grants to counties with similar election results and turnout before 2020. While Democratic counties were more likely to apply for a grant, we find that the grants did not have a noticeable effect on the presidential election. Our estimates of the average effect on Democratic vote share range from 0.03 to 0.36 percentage points. Our estimates of the average effect of receiving a grant on turnout range from 0.03 to 0.14 percentage points. Across specifications, our 95% CIs typically include negative effects and all fail to include effects on Democratic vote share larger than 0.58 percentage points and effects on turnout larger than 0.40 percentage points. We characterize the magnitude of our effects by asking how large they are compared to the margin by which Biden won the 2020 election. In simple bench-marking exercises, we find that the effects of the grants were likely too small to have changed the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

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Campaign finance vouchers do not reduce donor inequality

Cited by 3 publications

References 37 publications

Do Democracy Vouchers help democracy?

Do Democracy Vouchers help democracy?

Campaign Finance

Did private election administration funding advantage Democrats in 2020?

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