Web site tracks spending on legislative elections

To assist policy-makers and social scientists, a campus project is providing difficult-to-obtain information and research on the impact of some campaign finance laws.

The Wisconsin Campaign Finance Project, a privately funded research unit affiliated with the Department of Political Science, has created a new Web site that tracks campaign spending in states with laws that provide public financing of elections.

Ken Mayer, professor of political science and the project’s principal investigator, says the data will help researchers and policy-makers analyze the impact of “clean elections” programs. Ultimately, the site will include the UW–Madison project’s own analysis of the data.

“We want to make a positive contribution to the campaign finance debate without presuming to be for or against public funding,” Mayer says. “We wanted to make the data available as soon as we could, even before we had a chance to complete our own analysis, so that researchers could have access to it.”

Mayer says that while recent campaign finance data are often available electronically, the historical information contained on the site is difficult to gather, hampering efforts to accurately analyze the long-term impact of public financing laws. A private grant underwrites the expense of gathering the data and presenting it in a usable form.

“It’s taken us a year to put this together, and we’re still not quite done,” he says. “Short of traveling to various secretary-of-state and campaign-finance offices around the country, it’s impossible to get.”

Mayer notes that some states destroy their records after a period of time. He says the site will serve as an electronic archive of information about those states.

“Arizona destroys them after 10 years, and they killed the 1992 records before we could get them,” Mayer says. “They will destroy the 1994 records at the end of this year, at which point anyone who wants them will be out of luck.”

Mayer says the raw data and, once completed, his research and analysis of that data will help policy-makers and researchers better understand which public funding policies work and which don’t. The data, he says, already provide important context to the impact — or lack thereof — of public financing laws.

In Wisconsin, for example, public funding appears to only provide a small portion of how much candidates spend to win legislative seats. During the 2002 state Senate elections, $11,932 was the most public money made available to any one candidate. However, in some hotly contested races, candidates spent between $300,000 and $400,000.

Right now, the site has complete information for five states — Arizona, Maine, Minnesota, Nebraska and Wisconsin — and partial information for Hawaii. It also tracks New York City Council races.Ê Information on which government offices supplied the data and how others may contact those offices is also available.

The information, Mayer says, is presented in a way that makes it very clear how competitive a race is, making it easier for researchers and policy-makers to do empirical research.

Thomas Mann, W. Averell Harriman Chair and senior fellow of governance studies at the Brookings Institution, agrees, calling the site “an important new source of systematic data on public financing of state and local elections.”

Mann adds that the site will be instrumental in reviewing campaign finance issues arising after the federal Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002.

“It will be of immense assistance to scholars, journalists, activists and policy-makers as they explore post-BCRA issues of campaign finance reform,” Mann says.

All information is accessible by the public at http://campfin.polisci.wisc.edu/.