Laws that regulate the financing of campaigns are one attempt to attenuate the role of money in politics in hopes that citizens' opinions will receive more equal consideration when elected officials make policy decisions. Do states with stricter campaign finance laws actually display more egalitarian patterns of representation? Using public opinion measures from the National Annenberg Election Surveys and data on state policies, I first demonstrate that state policy decisions are consistently more proximate to the opinions of citizens with higher incomes. I then evaluate the relationship between the strictness of state campaign finance laws and political equality and find evidence that states with more stringent campaign finance disclosure requirements weigh citizens' opinions more equally in the policymaking process. However, I find no statistical relationship between the strictness of contribution limits or the presence of a public financing system and the equality of political representation.
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