Campaign Finance Reform

竞选财务改革

• 批准号: 0317691
• 负责人: Thomas Stratmann
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: George Mason University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing grant
• 财政年份: 2003
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2003-11-01 至 2006-09-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0317691&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Campaign; Finance; Reform

Campaign finance reform is a vigorously debated issue in virtually every U.S. election, both congressional and presidential. Some claim large amounts of campaign spending turn political races into fund-raising contests biased in favor of incumbents, while others argue that unrestricted spending may be the only way for challengers to even the playing field. To date, scant evidence exists regarding the effects of campaign finance restrictions on election outcomes. Whether stricter regulations amount to incumbency protection laws, or whether they help challengers to compete remain an unanswered empirical question.Although federal campaign finance laws have changed very little until the recent 2002 legislation, state campaign finance laws exhibit sufficient variation across states and over time. Changes in state-level regulations implemented over the past twenty years have the potential to provide insight into the effects of campaign finance regulation on vote shares and the closeness of elections, and also provide a natural testing ground for theoretical campaign finance models. Despite this, no systematic study of the effects of state-level campaign finance rules on electoral outcomes has been undertaken. This research project represents the first systematic study that comprehensively examines the effects of state-level campaign finance rules over the past twenty years. This study examines the effect of state campaign contribution law changes the competitiveness of state House elections between 1980 and 2002. This research project addresses the fact that changes in laws are not exogenous, and thus uses an instrumental variable technique to address the potential endogeneity of campaign contribution law changes. Thereby it identifies a causal effect of contribution limits and provides answers to long-standing questions as to how campaign finance laws affect

竞选资金改革是几乎每一次美国大选（无论是国会还是总统大选）都激烈辩论的问题。一些人声称，大量的竞选支出将政治竞选变成了有利于现任者的筹款竞赛，而另一些人则认为，不受限制的支出可能是挑战者获得公平竞争环境的唯一途径。迄今为止，竞选资金限制对选举结果的影响缺乏证据。更严格的监管是否相当于在职保护法，或者它们是否有助于挑战者竞争仍然是一个没有答案的实证问题。尽管联邦竞选财务法在最近的2002年立法之前变化很小，但各州的竞选财务法随着时间的推移表现出足够的变化。在过去的二十年中，州一级的法规实施的变化有可能提供洞察的影响，竞选资金监管的选票份额和选举的接近度，也提供了一个自然的测试场理论竞选资金模型。尽管如此，没有系统的研究国家一级的竞选资金规则对选举结果的影响进行了。这项研究项目代表了第一个系统的研究，全面审查了国家一级的竞选资金规则在过去二十年的影响。本研究探讨了1980年至2002年间州竞选捐款法对州众议院选举竞争力的影响。这个研究项目解决了这样一个事实，即法律的变化不是外生的，因此使用了工具变量技术来解决潜在的内生的竞选捐款法的变化。因此，它确定了捐款限制的因果关系，并回答了长期存在的问题，如竞选财务法如何影响