The Center for Competitive Politics (CCP) released preliminary results of a study today showing that state legislators who accepted taxpayer funds for their campaigns in 2008 did not reduce their pattern of voting with interest groups after the program was implemented. In many cases, lawmakers voted more often with the most powerful lobbying groups in Connecticut.
The Connecticut legislature is examining changes to the Citizens’ Election Program (CEP) after a federal court ruled the program unconstitutional. Backers of the CEP offered several rationales for pushing the program, prominently claiming that the system limited the influence of interest groups.
“The only ‘fix’ that legislators should impose on the Citizens’ Election Program is its dismantling,” said Center for Competitive Politics President Sean Parnell. “Taxpayer financed campaigns have failed to mute the influence of interest groups in Connecticut and research across the spectrum shows that politicians are raising money from the same people as before.”
In the report, “Meet the New Legislature, Same as the Old Legislature (20100303_ConnecticutCEPReport),” CCP studied the voting records of 121 state representatives and senators who served in the 2007-2008 legislature, participated in the CEP in 2008, and served in the 2009 legislature. CCP compared their records to the legislative positions of four interest groups; The Connecticut Business & Industry Association (CBIA), Connecticut Conference of Municipalities (CCM), Connecticut Hospital Association, and the Connecticut Association of Health Plans. Each of these groups has ranked among the top ten in lobbying expenditures in the past three years.
If advocates of CEP are correct, and campaign contributions connected to influential organized interests have in the past led to undue influence and elected officials neglecting citizens in favor of donors, then the removal of such campaign contributions should lead legislators to vote less often in favor of such groups.
Instead, the research shows in most cases minimal changes in legislative voting patterns—generally in the direction of legislators voting more frequently with these interest groups.
For example, CBIA has been the biggest spender on lobbying for each of the last three years. In the 2007 and 2008 sessions, House members on average voted with CBIA 38.1% of the time and Senators cast 39.1% of their votes in favor of CBIA. In 2009, both chambers increased the frequency with which they voted for CBIA’s legislative agenda, rising to 45.9% in the House and 42.6% in the Senate.
These findings strongly suggest that CEP has failed in one of its major goals, to somehow change the voting behavior of elected officials. The most likely reason for this failure is that, contrary to the assumptions of CEP’s advocates, campaign contributions have very little influence on how legislators voter. This would be consistent with the overwhelming majority of academic research on this subject, generally finding very little causal relationship between donations and legislative votes.
“Supporters of taxpayer financed campaigns rely on buzz words like reform and other rhetorical devices to bolster their questionable claims,” Parnell said. “Now, Connecticut citizens can examine the facts: giving politicians taxpayer money to pay for their bumper stickers and TV ads does not change the way the Capitol operates.”
CCP’s research follows a report released by the Campaign Finance Institute (CFI) showing that CEP failed in another of its main goals: to encourage candidates to expand beyond their traditional donor bases and solicit contributions from non-traditional donor communities. CFI’s finding in this regard is virtually identical to CCP’s earlier research on New Jersey’s failed 2007 experiment with taxpayer financed political campaigns, which concluded “[t]here is little evidence that candidates solicited or at least received contributions from beyond the traditional donor community of business people and professionals as well as members of politically-active interest groups.”
