Public Campaign Finance and the Incumbency Advantage

Abstract

Despite an increasing incumbency advantage at the state legislative level, there has yet to be an assessment of how the advantage varies across state-level campaign finance regimes. These laws range from near complete deregulation to full public funding. This paper estimates the advantage for lower chamber candidates in 45 states over 28 years and, through the use of a fixed effects panel framework, models the advantage as a function of state-specific variables and broader conditions. We find minimal effects for campaign finance laws, with the exception of full public funding programs, which decrease the incumbency advantage by 2 percent of the two-party vote, cutting it roughly in half. We corroborate this finding for full public funding by applying the synthetic control method to the incumbency advantage in Arizona, an early adopter of this reform, and there, we find a reduction in the advantage of 1.65 percent of the two-party vote. Word Count: 8,431 * This paper was originally prepared for the 2011 meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, Ill., March 31‐April 3. We would like to thank Anna Bosak, Joseph Durheim, and Michael Horecki for their research assistance; David Primo and Jeffrey Milyo for sharing their data; and R. Keith Gaddie, Jonathan Krasno, and Neal Malhotra for their advice and comments. 1 Disclosure: One of the authors (Mayer) served as an expert witness for the State of