Good Money and Bad Money: Do Funding Sources Affect Electoral Outcomes?

Abstract

There is lively public debate about the normative impact of different kinds of money in elections. However, there is surprisingly little examination of the practical impact that funding sources have on election outcomes. Even if we assume that voters do not care directly about campaign finance, there may still be incentives built into the system to discourage fundraising from some sources and encourage it from others. Therefore, I examine the actual impact of out-of-state donations, PAC donations, and self-financing on election outcomes in open seat House elections in the 1996, 1998, 2000 and 2002 cycles. I find that some kinds of fundraising are correlated with success, while others are correlated with failure, although at a lesser level than district partisanship or total campaign spending. These results offer promise for addressing some measurement issues in the congressional election field, as well as possible directions for future research.