Show Me the Money: 'Dark Money' and the Informational Benefit of Campaign Finance Disclosure

Abstract

Campaign finance compliance and transparency reveal important non-policy attributes that voters care about. They may signal how the candidate would govern if elected. Using vignette and conjoint survey experiments, I show that voters in primary elections base their candidate selection on transparency considerations, even where the candidate shares the respondents’ preferred policy positions. The findings bring campaign finance compliance into the scholarly conversation about candidate valence, and they explain why some primary candidates discourage dark money support only to embrace it in the general election.