The Increase in Campaign Expenditures in State Legislative Elections: a Comparison of Four Northwestern States

Abstract

ntil recently, the difficulty of obtaining state legislative campaign finance data meant that only a few political scientists had broached the subject (see, e.g., Adamany 1969; Alexander 1976; Owens and Olson 1977; and Glantz et al. 1976). Within the last decade, however, there is an increased scholarly attention in the subject. Aside from Ruth Jones's (1984) and Herbert Alexander's (1991) comprehensive reviews, there are basically two types of such studies. The first type explores the relationship between some measure of campaign funding (either expenditures or contributions), and electoral outcomes. In these studies, expenditures are treated as one of several independent variables, and electoral outcome is the dependent variable. This genre, represented by studies such as Tucker and Weber (1987), Giles and Pritchard (1985), and Caldeira and Patterson (1982), generally find that campaign expenditures and party strength are important correlates of electoral success.