Does Public Election Funding Create More Extreme Legislators? Evidence from Arizona and Maine

Abstract

We investigate whether Maine and Arizona’s Clean Elections laws, which provide public funding for state legislative candidates, are responsible for producing a new cadre of legislators who are unusually ideologically extreme. We find that there is essentially no important difference in the legislative voting behavior of “clean” funded legislators and traditionally funded ones in either Arizona or Maine: those who are financed by private donors are no more or less ideologically extreme than those who are supported by the state. This finding calls into question some concerns about the effects on polarization of money generally and public funding in particular.

Keywords

campaign finance political behavior election rules parties and elections parties and interest groups parties in legislatures legislative behavior roll call voting legislative politics

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