Abstract
Independent expenditures (IEs) in U.S. elections have increased substantially at nearly all levels of government over the past decade, but judicial decisions are only a partial explanation for this...
Highlights
More than a decade has gone by since the Supreme Court decided that corporations have a constitutionally protected right to make unlimited independent expenditures (IEs)
The analysis points us away from seeing contribution limits as a primary explanation for IEs, when we look at the spending sectors separately
The sectoral results remind us that different spenders will place their priorities on different goals, some of which are better realized through IEs than contributions
Summary
More than a decade has gone by since the Supreme Court decided that corporations have a constitutionally protected right to make unlimited independent expenditures (IEs). (See, for example, Obama 2010.) Others believed that Citizens United’s application to non-profit corporations freed issue and ideological advocacy entities to attract potential donors away from the political parties, weakening the parties’ relative power and feeding the forces that had been helping to polarize politics (La Raja and Schaffner 2015). These authors argued that removing the limits on contributions to and from the political parties would reverse the flow of money, bringing money back from independent spending organizations, reducing their absolute and relative power. Others predicted that independent spending would dry up if the laws were rewritten to remove the limits on contributions to candidates (Institute for Free Speech 2017)
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