Legislators spend considerable time dialing for dollars to support their party, even if they themselves are not in electoral danger. That helps them move up the party leadership ladder, but does not help them achieve their policy goals. Michael Kistner finds that when legislators spend a lot of time raising money, they spend less making policy. By rewarding fundraising, parties miss out on both diverse leaders and effective legislators. But states that reform their campaign finance system are able to make more landmark policies.
Guests: Michael Kistner, University of Houston
Study: Paying for the Party
Transcript
Matt Grossmann: Legislative fundraising inhibits policymaking, this week on The Science of Politics. For the Niskanen Center, I’m Matt Grossmann. Legislators spend considerable time dialing for dollars to support their party, even if they themselves are not in electoral danger. That helps them move up the party leadership ladder, but it may not help them achieve their policy goals. Even where America’s system of private campaign finance doesn’t lead to corruption, it may trade off with successful policymaking.
This week I talked to Michael Kistner of the University of Houston about his new Chicago book Paying for the Party. He finds that when legislators spend a lot of time raising money, they spend less making policy. But states that reform their campaign finance system are able to make more landmark policies. Individual legislators still have incentives to raise more money because that helps them get in positions of power. But that means the parties miss out on diverse leaders, selecting for financial goals instead. The research shows real downsides to our emphasis on party campaign money, but it also shows that reforms can make a difference. I think you’ll enjoy our conversation.
Tell us about the findings and takeaways from the new book Paying for the Party.
Michael Kistner: Thank you, Matt, first off. Yeah, the book is an effort to better understand a major change in U.S. politics over the last several decades: the growing importance of fundraising if you’re a member of Congress or if you’re a state legislator. What the public suspects, and tuned-in political observers actually know, is that elected officials spend a lot of their time trying to raise money.
We actually have a pretty good idea of how much this is in some cases. There are some leaked documents from Congress, the major political parties, Democrats and Republicans, initiating their new members, where they tell their members to set aside about 40% of their work week, or 15, 16 hours or so, to trying to raise money, calling donors, going to these fundraising events, those sorts of activities. We have at least anecdotal evidence from state legislatures that there’s a lot of similar sorts of things going on. So before major votes in a state capitol, oftentimes half or more of state legislators will be holding these fundraising events. Lobbyists will go from event to event, shaking hands with legislators, handing out checks. So fundraising is this really prevalent aspect of modern American politics.
The funny thing is, this isn’t the way it’s always been. There’s been a really drastic increase beginning in the 1990s or so. The book sort of charts out some of the history of this increase and what this looks like, but there’s been a shifting of focus to fundraising over some of these other tasks that legislators are traditionally expected to do, like passing legislation.
Now, we don’t really know all that much about what effects this transformation has had on U.S. politics. I describe some of the existing literature in the book, and there certainly is some really important studies out there. But in terms of the consequences for things like policymaking and representation, there really hasn’t been all that much empirical research up until this point in time. So the main findings of the book, the main things that I try and argue with the book is that there’s a pretty predictable answer for why and where we see these fundraising systems emerge. And there’s some pretty important consequences for both policymaking and representation.
Matt Grossmann: You raised two broad questions in the book that you say you’re able to answer, so I’ll ask them to you in turn. The first one is, why is it that legislators are spending so much time fundraising for their parties?
Michael Kistner: So the reason that they’re spending all this time fundraising is because their parties and their party’s leaders ask them to do it. That’s a little bit of a trite answer, an overly simplistic answer, so let me give you a slightly more detailed answer and then a much more detailed answer.
The slightly more detailed answer is, members spend all this time raising money because their parties and their leaders set up incentive structures, a system of sticks and carrots that tries to persuade their members to raise money and give it. Of course, what’s more interesting is going back a step and asking, why is it the case that parties and leaders have set up systems to incentivize this task? The reason, which I get into in detail in the book, is that raising money for one’s party is a collective action problem.
Before I go any further, it’s worth being clear that a lot of the raise in fundraising, the increase in fundraising demands that we’ve seen over this time period, is not about fundraising for a member’s own campaign race. Incumbents in American politics win reelection at really high rates and aren’t as reliant on money as other candidates. But instead, what they’re doing is they’re raising all this money to give it to their parties, things like party committees, the campaign committees, the DCCC on Capitol Hill, and so forth, or they’re just giving it directly to other candidates. They’re writing checks for these other candidates.
Party leaders really like setting up the system because there’s an inherent inefficiency in who can raise the most money and who needs money the most. Those who can raise the most money are incumbents, people with powerful positions like committee chairs and members of the extended party leadership and the like. But these also tend to be really secure members who don’t need their money as much. On the other hand, if they can take those fundraising advantages, raise lots of money and give it to challengers, open seat candidates, a handful of vulnerable incumbents, the dollars can really make a difference in those key races.
The problem, of course, is that members would, by and large, rather be doing other things with their time than dialing for dollars and trying to beg for bucks from these donors. So what parties do is they set up incentives in order to encourage members to fundraise. Now, this can take a wide variety of forms. It can be favored consideration for the legislation a member has, extra funding for their district. But the biggest reward, the biggest incentive that parties have to offer is rising within the party hierarchy: getting on that desirable committee, something like Ways and Means or the Rules Committee that have a lot of impact on what happens in a chamber, being able to become a committee chair, being able to become a majority whip, for instance, possibly be on the path to one day being speaker. These are the things that parties can give to the members who raise the most money and show the most financial loyalty to the party.
Parties decide they want to win as many races as possible. They want to win the majority of their chamber. They need their members to raise lots of money and give it to the races where it’s going to make a difference. And that’s why members are now responding. They’re spending all this time raising money because they’re trying to, by and large, advance within their parties, and fundraising ability, fundraising generosity, that’s the way to do it.
Matt Grossmann: The other big question you say you answer is, what are the effects of this increase on politics and policymaking within legislature? What are they?
Michael Kistner: I sort of foreshadowed it a little bit already, but I’ll go into some more detail. One of the two main consequences that I focus on in the book is what this means in terms of how representative the power structure within a legislature is. So if parties are rewarding members based on how much money they raise and how much they contribute to their parties, that has the consequences of allowing some types of legislators to rise within the party ranks at the expense of other types of legislators.
Here, it’s probably helpful to discuss how political scientists have traditionally thought about things like the decision of who to make a committee chair or who to become a party leader. The traditional literature emphasizes such factors as seniority or how long a member has been part of a committee, which allows them to develop expertise in a particular jurisdiction, understand the ins and outs of the policy area, the major players. They’ll prioritize members who have certain backgrounds that align with the committee’s interests. They also really prioritize ideological alignment with the rest of the party. They want to promote people who aren’t going to be way more extreme or perhaps way more moderate than the party as a whole. They want to put people in place who are going to represent the party well.
So that’s in a world in which fundraising isn’t this predominant concern. But all of a sudden, fundraising becomes really important to these decisions, to the point where in Congress today and in several state legislatures as well, I identify some examples in the book, there are actually formal dues amounts, exact dollar amount minimums that members have to contribute to party goals to be even considered to be a committee chair. So what happens? What we observe is cases where there’s senior members, very productive members in terms of the amount of bills that they sponsor and the policy work they do getting passed over for these advancement and promotion decisions for people who are good fundraisers and can bring a lot of money to the party’s goals. So that’s one sort of distortion. You’re passing over these good lawmakers and instead focusing on these good fundraisers, and they’re the ones who start climbing the party ranks.
But what’s even more concerning, to some extent, or at least is also a concerning element of this, is that there’s really strong biases and advantages and disadvantages baked in to the system in terms of who is able to fundraise the best. We know from people like Adam Bonica who have looked into this question that good fundraisers tend to disproportionately come from a few occupational backgrounds. Lawyers are really good at having networks that contribute a lot of money, people with business backgrounds who have business connections. In contrast, we know from people like Nick Carnes and others that working class legislators struggle to raise so much money because they don’t have the professional networks they can go to and give. So in a world in which fundraising is this really important factor in determining who rises to power within the party, we see a lot of lawyers and business people and doctors, not so many working class legislators, at the top.
Similarly, there’s biases in terms of white versus non-white legislators, women versus men legislators. What I find in the book is that in state legislatures where these party fundraising systems have taken hold, and it’s a really important factor in who advanced within the party, we see fewer women, fewer Black, fewer Hispanic legislators rising up in the party ranks and becoming committee chairs, party leaders, and the like. So that’s the representation side. That’s one of the answers to what the consequences have been.
The second consequence that I spend a lot of time focusing on in the book is what this means for policymaking. In other words, if members are spending 40% of their time on these fundraising tasks, is that taking them away from doing things like drafting legislation, building coalitions, conducting oversight, gathering information? All these other activities that we think are really critical to a legislator’s job as a lawmaker. So are there trade-offs, and does that have an impact on the total amount of legislation that institution is able to pass?
So what I do to try and answer that question is I focus on a couple of campaign finance reforms I identify that reduce the amount of time that legislators spend fundraising during legislative session. The first is really straightforward. It’s bans on fundraising during legislative session. Approximately half of state legislatures have a ban of this form. It simply states that any fundraising activity has to take place at a different time in the calendar year than when the legislature is meeting and working on passing policy. So it really cleanly separates the lawmaking period versus when members can do fundraising.
The second reform I look at is public funding of elections. In a few states, members can raise a amount of money from small dollar donors, established viability, and then the state will pay for their campaign in its entirety. So this reduces the amount of fundraising demands legislators do. In fact, in order to accept the money from the state, they have to agree not to raise additional money. There’s some conditions attached that prevent that additional fundraising. What we see is that party fundraising contributions by members to their parties dip sharply after public funding goes into place.
So what I do is I take those two reforms, these session restrictions and public funding, and I look at cases where those are either implemented in a particular state or the state gets rid of that particular reform. And I see what happens. What I find is, using difference in differences models and synthetic control models, when you put one of these reforms into place and members spend less time fundraising, you see an increase in the amount of major laws that get enacted, a fairly sizable increase. Somewhere between 10 to 20% increase in the amount of major laws that get enacted is what I find in my main analyses.
Matt Grossmann: You have focused on the states for this book, but I know a lot of your work is on Congress, so presumably you needed the institutional variation and some of the other things that we get from the states. But what is your view of how well the lessons travel between what your findings are in the states and in Congress, and the reverse, how much we can learn about the unique processes in Congress by expanding the analysis to the states?
Michael Kistner: That’s an excellent question. In my mind, I want to be able to speak to what’s happening in Congress as well as state legislatures even though the data in the context of my analyses are focused on the states for the reasons that I’ve said already, that my research design takes advantage of these campaign finance reforms that reduce or increase the amount of time members have to spend fundraising.
The short answer is, I think there’s elements of this analysis that apply to Congress as well, and maybe some reasons why it might not. There’s an entire chapter of the book which is dedicated to just a theoretical discussion of under what circumstances we should expect these fundraising demands to really inhibit policymaking, and offering some reasons why they might not. For example, one reason why we might not think that asking members to spend so much time fundraising would impact the amount of legislation that gets passed is that there’s-
… impact the amount of legislation that gets passed is that there’s other groups that are involved in the policymaking process and maybe they can substitute for members’ time. So think about staffers here who do a lot of the leg work for drafting legislation and getting it advanced.
I draw in some of Richard Hall’s work on participation in Congress to make the argument that even though staffers can do some of the work, there’s a lot of formal activities that only legislators themselves can be involved in. So I think even in that case, it’s going to still have an impact on fundraising. I also talk about things like lobbyists, interest groups, some of these organizations that play a role in the policymaking process. And so again, I think that they can substitute for some of the policymaking activities, but not all of them.
So I think about some of the scope conditions under which this is going to matter more or less, and most, I think apply about equally as well to the Congress as the state legislatures. It’s maybe differences of degree versus differences of kind, wholesale differences. One aspect that I do think distinguishes Congress from the state legislatures that’s really important to think about here is the centralization of policymaking by party leadership in recent years. So this is something that James Curry and Francis Lee have written quite a bit about. But in general, it is the case that a lot of really important policy work happens behind closed doors by leadership teams as opposed to rank and file members being the ones responsible.
So if this is the case, it might mean that asking rank and file members to spend all this time fundraising might not have as much of an impact on policymaking in Congress as it would in state legislatures where members often lack the same amount of support and also leadership is less powerful, it’s more egalitarian in its power structure and rank and file members play a greater role in policymaking. So that’s the one sort of caveat or asterisk I have about my policymaking findings. But I do discuss in the book the fact that this sort of plays in both directions because it’s so valuable to parties to have their rank and file members be going out and collecting these big dollar checks from donors as much as possible, it gives an extra reason for parties to have policymaking centralized within leadership.
The leaders are really happy with the state of affairs because not only do they get so much policy influence, but they have this army of fundraisers that they can set off to do these tasks that help them win elections. So it makes it more appealing to have this sort of power structure that we have and the current Congress. And I think the forces push in both ways.
As far as the representation findings go, I do think the representation findings would translate quite well to Congress. I think the biases that I identify in the campaign finance system in Congress also apply to Congress as well. So Jake Grumbach has some really good work with Alex Sahn and others in terms of looking at some of these biases, and those seem to be pretty present at the Congressional as well as the state legislative level. And so I think we see by and large members of Congress advancing within the party who are good fundraisers and not necessarily representative on these other dimensions.
Matt Grossmann: So you get variation across the states not just in their campaign finance, but in really the degree to which they’ve created these kind of party fundraising apparatuses and you focus on Alabama and Connecticut. And so if you could tell those stories, but also I guess address that while there is a relationship between close competition and these party fundraising apparatuses that there are a lot of states where we don’t have very close competition for a majority right now, but there’s still these built-in institutional additional biases or prioritizations on fundraising. So, why is that?
Michael Kistner: Yeah, so there’s a couple dimensions to this story and you bring in competition, I haven’t had a chance to speak that much about competition yet in the interview, but it’s worth putting that on the table and then talking about what Alabama has to say about that.
So I mentioned before that parties and their leaders put these systems of incentives into place to get their members to fundraise to help them win elections. And ultimately, the ultimate goal for parties is to be in the majority of a chamber, not the minority party. Because being in the majority comes with it all sorts of great leverage policy tools that leaders can use, just the most coveted assignments. And so this is a main goal for parties, to try and win majorities.
Now, in some places, as you allude to, it’s not all that competitive. It’s not all that much of a mystery. If we think about the modern day United States, we can think of places like California being very safe for Democrats or a place like the current version of Florida being very safe for Republicans. And so in those types of states it’s not as important to try and raise all this money to try and fight the fight for majority status. It’s sort of a settled matter.
But that’s not always the case, and this shifts quite a bit even within states over time. So in the book I go into sort of a deep dive on what happened in Alabama in the first decade of the 2000s, where we’re starting to see this realignment of a solid south state from Democratic control to Republican control. Now this might seem a little bit surprising if there’s younger listeners or people less familiar with political history, but Alabama used to be a solidly democratically controlled state, very much not the case anymore. And like many southern states, this realignment took place a lot later than it did in presidential elections.
So you start seeing Republicans having some modest gains in terms of picking up additional seats in Alabama during the early 2000s. But it’s not really until a man named Mike Hubbard takes control of the Republican party versus the minority leader in the House and leader is the speaker of the House and sort of institutes these really broad changes in how Alabama Republicans are operating. So Hubbard came from a background of media, he owned a company that covered Auburn sports and was a very charismatic, hardworking individual who he enters the legislature and quickly becomes known for being able to raise a lot of money from these big donors and giving it to his fellow members to help them win their races.
So this ultimately results in Hubbard being nominated and selected to be minority leader in the Alabama House where he, along with his counterpart in the Alabama Senate, start instituting these widespread changes institutionalizing party fundraising. So the things that he implements are things like a due schedule. Every caucus member was required to contribute some set amount based in part on how competitive their own race was and what position they were in. There also was effort to try and pressure members, sort of name and shame the members who didn’t participate in these efforts. He creates this donors club called the Governor’s Circle, where he goes around the state and meeting with these big people in the business community in Alabama asking them for lots of money. He hires a professional fundraising firm. All of these changes which result in Republicans in Alabama, all of a sudden raising way more money than they ever had before. And members of the Alabama state legislature go from only about 15% giving serious money to their party to about half of Alabama legislators participating in these efforts.
Well this pays off ultimately, in 2010, a massive sweep, Republicans completely flipped the chamber. They demolished Democrats. In all of a sudden, Republicans are in control where they weren’t before. Following this, Hubbard starts giving out some of these valuable committee assignments to the people who raised the most during the campaign season. All right, so again, showing this decision of trying to reward your good fundraisers with these important positions. And we see this take off in terms of party fundraising in Alabama, but then perhaps somewhat surprisingly, it starts to dip off in subsequent years when it becomes really clear that Alabama is solidly Republican and is not going back to Democratic control anytime soon.
So that’s the one state case of party fundraising and competition. I also do a broader quantitative 50 state analysis using the data in the book. And I do find a really robust correlation between competition between parties and the amount of party fundraising that occurs. And that’s true both across states, so states with a higher baseline level of competition have more party fundraising. But it’s true within states as well, so states like Alabama that undergo this transformation, you see as competition increases, party fundraising increases. as it diminishes, party fundraising decreases.
Now there’s certainly some exceptions, a few places where it doesn’t seem all that competitive, and we still see some high levels of fundraising. There are some baseline needs for just members and candidates to run campaigns. And so there still is some value to this party fundraising even in cases where states aren’t particularly competitive. But by and large, the pattern is strongest where there’s the most competition, we see the most party fundraising.
So the other state, since you mentioned it that I want to spend a little bit of time talking about is the case of Connecticut, which sort of illustrates a different path that states can take and also illustrates why some of these campaign finance reforms that I study are important. So Connecticut in the early 2000s started to see, if you look in my data at the amount of party fundraising that’s going on, there’s starting to be an upward kick in party fundraising, it’s pretty low, but more members are engaging in it, they’re contributing higher amounts.
But then in 2003, there’s this really notable scandal with the governor of Connecticut at the time who is involved in this sort of pay to play, quid pro quo scheme where he gives out favorable contracts to some contractors working for the states, and they end up giving him all these nice shiny things like a new hot tub and a kitchen renovation and some really nice kickbacks. Well, this becomes public and becomes a huge scandal, and there’s more politicians who get implicated over time as this sort of spreads and there’s this massive push in the state for some sort of campaign finance reform to prevent this type of thing from happening in the future.
Well, for a variety of specific reasons that I go into in more detail in the chapter of the book that looks at this, one of the components of this campaign finance reform that Connecticut settles on is public funding of elections, which I mentioned earlier. So they call this a citizen’s election program. The idea is to take members, make them less reliant on donors and big money and be able to focus more at least theory, this is how the reform is sold, on representing the people of their state. This isn’t done for a policy productivity argument. It’s not saying, hey, members are spending too much time fundraising. It’s more this question of who’s getting advantages based on what they’re able to contribute either legally or illegally and trying to shut that down.
But it has the consequence, what I show in the Connecticut case is that after this goes into effect, incumbents buy into the program, they start participating, they stop raising the money themselves and giving it to their parties. And consequently what we see in the case of Connecticut is a pretty sizable increase in the amount of major laws that get passed. Suggesting that there is this trade-off once you make people less focused on raising money, it leads to this more productive lawmaking as a result.
Matt Grossmann: So yeah, you mentioned this very interesting analysis that you’re able to conduct on whether states succeed in major lawmaking and showing that these reforms were able to increase lawmaking and that points to this idea that time spent fundraising is trading off with policymaking. So walk us through what that analysis looks like and what you were able to conclude from it.
Michael Kistner: Yeah. So one of the key elements behind this was finding a way to identify major lawmaking in a way that really hadn’t been done at the state level before. So this is something that scholars of Congress have been doing for quite some time, most notably David Mayhew in the 1990s, Divided We Govern, sort of came up with this list of significant or landmark legislation and made some arguments about why divided government may or may not have an effect on significant lawmaking.
The reason of course to focus on significant lawmaking is there’s a whole lot of stuff that gets passed by legislatures that doesn’t in the end result to all that much real-world impact. Things like resolutions, naming post offices and bridges and coins and the like. There’s a lot of that that takes place and we wouldn’t expect that to be impacted, nor would we care as much about the impact of things like fundraising demands on that type of legislation.
So instead what I do is I come up with a way to scale sort of the analysis that Mayhew does in Divided We Govern at a much broader level. Just like David Mayhew focuses on coverage by news sources, a law is more important if it’s significant enough that a major newspaper writes a story about it. I start with that as a beginning point for my analysis by looking at Associated Press coverage of state legislation during the time period of 2000 to 2018. Now I rely on Associated Press news coverage because during this time period, the AP has bureaus in all 50 states, they’re covering state politics in all 50 states, and they’re writing up stories about these piece of legislation that they view as being significant enough to draw attention to.
Now that’s sort of the sweep one of my analysis, collecting those actual mentions. I have a sweep two that ensures that I’m not missing anything important just because of some particularities of specific state bureau or idiosyncratic decision of what to cover or what not to cover. And what I do is I train a classified machine learning model to predict which types of legislation are most similar to those mentioned by the Associated Press. So based on the text contained within, if there’s for example, law that expands Medicaid in one state that the AP wrote about, the model would detect in another state if there was another law that also expanded Medicaid and used similar language, it would also classify that as a major.
So what I end up with is a data set where-
What I end up with is a data set where about 25% or so of legislation reaches this threshold that I call major or important enough to be worthy of mention in a news source at the time. So then that’s my primary dependent variable, the outcome that I care about, what effect fundraising demands have on laws of this level. I then go ahead and use a difference in differences analysis that essentially intuitively takes place what I described in Connecticut, looking at this before and after comparison before public funding went into effect and after, and sees if there’s a change in the amount of major laws that get enacted following the reform. So that’s the difference, in differences comparing across a bunch of other states where these reforms were not put into place to act as a baseline control in a counterfactual world in which Connecticut didn’t enact this campaign finance reform, would we have observed something similar or is this unique to a place like Connecticut that enacted this reform?
So I go ahead and I estimate these differences and differences models. I use some of the more modern tools that account for this differences in treatment timing. For those of your listeners who are really into the causal inference literature, their ears will perk up at that. I use things like stacking designs to address some of those issues. But ultimately, regardless of which models I run, I find fairly similar results for session restrictions on fundraising, I find about a 20% bump or so. In the amount of major legislation that gets passed with public funding, it’s about 10% or so, and notably both to investigate it as a question of interest on its own right, but also to benchmark what those magnitudes mean, I look at divided government.
When the governors of one party and the legislature is controlled by another party, or the legislature split control, and what I find is that divided government leads to about a 20% reduction in the amount of major legislation that gets passed. This is something that contributes to the debate on divided government, its effects that’s taken place in a variety of different studies already, but also shows that we’re seeing for some of these reforms. These are in the same approximate magnitude of something like divided government, which we think we have strong priors should be a pretty strong effect itself.
Matt Grossmann: So as you know, when I first heard this, I was like, “Wait, in the course of researching campaign finance, you incidentally created a measure that was long missing for the states of one of our most important outcomes, actual big changes in policy.”
So what are the basics that you learned from that? You mentioned the association with divided government. What does the distribution look like? Are most states making a lot of a policy most of the time? Are there big spurts in time, or big partisan patterns here? You’ve shown that campaign finance reforms can have big impact here, but what are the basic contours of state major policy?
Michael Kistner: Yeah, so it was really interesting, and you’re absolutely right. I, for my purposes, studied fundraising demands and campaign finance reforms that affect them. That was my interest in this policymaking by states. But there’s all sorts of other interesting things that you can do with this data, and I’m going to be sharing this data with scholars who want to use it for their own purposes.
But just to get into some of those questions you had about what the patterns look like across and within states, I of course have done quite a bit of digging into the data myself and a few notable things stand out first. There’s some pretty wide variation. There are states, California is at the top of the list in terms of most productive, where I see 500 plus major laws getting enacted every two-year session. There’s a lot of really important legislation, which isn’t terribly surprising given that California is the largest state, a really big economy. There’s a lot of demand, different industries and sectors that might require legislative efforts of various types.
And at the other end of the spectrum, we have cases where there are two-year sessions where maybe a couple dozen major laws get enacted and that’s it, which by the standards of the rest of the states, it’s pretty modest in terms of law making impact. A natural follow-up question is what explains this variation? Obviously, campaign finance reforms and divided government speak to that a little bit, but there’s a lot more going on there.
I can’t give a comprehensive answer to this question, but I can tell you a couple of things that I looked at. One aspect is legislative professionalism. For the state politics, people who are listening, they’re familiar with this, others may be as well, but there’s a long history of thinking about these elements of what gives a state legislature capacity to pass laws. This is things like staffing, expenditures and resources, how much money the legislature has available, how long it’s in session, how much time it has to pass major legislation. I do find a pretty robust correlation where more professional states states with more of these policymaking resources, they do pass more major laws.
Now, I want to be a little bit cautious here. It’s difficult to ascertain causality in a case like this. We don’t see drastic shifts over time in legislative professionalism, which would allow me to use something like a difference in differences design like I do for the main analyses. And so it could be possible that states that have some need for more policy, they’ve developed these resources to try and equip them to do so. It could be that there’s some other lurking confounding factor that is associated with both professionalism and policymaking.
The second major thing I looked at was whether there are differences between Democrats and Republicans, states controlled by Democrats versus states controlled by Republicans. And this is something, when I talk to people about this topic, the question comes up a lot, and the baseline intuition most people have is that Democrats are going to be more productive lawmakers, they’re going to pass more laws simply because there’s a big government association with Democrats, the Democratic Party. There’s a view that they want more social policy perhaps, and so that’s something that could lead to more policymaking.
But coming in, I was a little bit skeptical of some of those arguments. There’s all sorts of priorities, policy goals that Republican majorities have as well, and even rolling back the size of government and its functions often requires legislation in order to accomplish. And so I felt a little validated when I actually dug into the data and didn’t find major differences between Republicans and Democrats.
That’s something where I have compared both across states, so there’s states that during this entire time period are Democrat controlled like a California, or Republican controlled like a Texas, and on average there’s not much of a difference between the two of those types of states. And even in this case, I can look within states and look what happens when in a case like Alabama for instance, we go from Democratic control to Republican control. Do we see a dip in legislative productivity? And I don’t find that really, there’s no real significant differences between Republicans and Democrats. Both Democrats and Republicans pass major laws on a variety of topics, which goes into a lot of what state legislatures do is not necessarily partisan or ideological. A lot of it is focused on the day-to-day necessities of keeping a state in its economy running, and that’s something that both Democrats and Republicans have a stake in.
Matt Grossmann: So another big finding on the policymaking side or the implication side is that women and minority elected officials are less likely to rise up the ranks in places where party fundraising demands are greater. Give us a bit of the background as to why that occurs for those that aren’t familiar with these findings in the campaign finance literature, and then how we should interpret that. Is this the major barrier to representation within caucuses, or is this one factor among many?
Michael Kistner: That’s a great question. I view it as a factor among many. There’s other factors to think about here, but it’s a factor that I do find in my analyses is substantial in impact, so it’s worth thinking about and counting when trying to understand what obstacles are in place for certain types of legislators to advance and then wield power within their party. The chapter where I really dive into it, it’s the penultimate chapter of the book.
I lead off with this quote from a woman’s state legislator who’s describing some of the differences between her and her male colleagues when it comes to fundraising. And essentially, I’m going to paraphrase a bit here. She says, “I don’t have all of these buddies who own their own businesses and are willing to cut these several thousand dollars checks to me to help me raise all this money. I have to go out and make these connections and do work that my male colleagues don’t have to do.”
And so there is this difference in terms of both the occupational backgrounds that women come into state legislatures with as opposed to men. So for instance, they’re more likely to come from fields such as teaching, fields such as nursing, or sometimes have union backgrounds, things that are different than their male colleagues to some extent, at least on average. And so as a result, they simply don’t have the same levels of professional networks that they can tap into to raise the same amounts of money.
I go into the differences for white versus non-white legislators, and I sketch out that relationship as well. An additional factor there is a lot of non-white legislators represent minority-majority districts. And these types of districts tend to be lower average income to not have the amount of money that legislators can tap into for fundraising purposes as these white legislators who represent white majority districts.
There’s a variety of different obstacles that these types of legislators have to raising as much money, and the problem is when these party fundraising systems are put into place and parties are giving these valuable positions, these committee positions, these leadership positions to the members who can raise the most, even if they’re not intentionally trying to discriminate, they don’t have any specific reason to favor white legislators over non-white legislators or men over women. By simply prioritizing who can raise the most money, they’re going to give a leg up to those types of legislators who come from those more advantaged groups.
And so when I do my analyses, I note that, first off, there are differences between representation. There’s an under-representation of women, an under-representation of non-white legislators, an under-representation of working class legislators in pretty much all legislatures. This is across the board, even in places where there isn’t party fundraising. But the key finding is that that degree of under-representation, it’s significantly higher and state legislatures where party fundraising plays a really big role in shaping those decisions. This suggests that one of the, I would argue hidden costs because to my knowledge, I’m the first one to advance this argument, advance this concern. One of the hidden costs of this transformation to prioritizing fundraising so much has been leaving some of these disadvantaged groups behind when it comes to who rises to power within a legislature.
Matt Grossmann: This book on money in politics has all of these important interesting outcomes, but isn’t as focused on the key publicly raised questions about money in politics, which is usually does money by elections and does it by votes in legislatures or policy outcomes. And I guess the caricature of this debate has been that political science has mostly accumulated evidence to suggest those relationships aren’t as strong as the public or reformers think that they are, but I want to hear your take. Is this an avoidance of these questions because we’ve answered them and the answers aren’t that concerning, or what are the relationships between your outcomes of interest and these traditional concerns?
Michael Kistner: Yeah, that’s a really great question and something I spend a lot of time thinking about. A lot of my research is in the realm of money in politics I teach, I’m currently teaching a money in American politics class to undergraduates here at the University of Houston. And you’re right, I think you’ve characterized the understanding of political scientists accurately, even if that understanding is a little bit questionable. So just to back up a little bit, a lot of time and attention has been spent for understandable reasons on trying to determine if money buys policy victories. Is it the case that those who contribute large amounts of money to particular legislators, all of a sudden legislators start voting for their particular policy priorities in Congress or other legislatures?
There was a period the early 2000s where I think there was a lot of muddied, some people would say, “Yes, money does have this quid pro quo I give, you give me policy favors in return that is going on.”
And then there were other studies that said no, that this isn’t really going on. There were a couple of really famous meta-analyses by people like Figurado, Snyder, and Ansela Bayer that tallied up all these studies said, “Look, we see it both ways. It’s hard to tell, we’re going to throw up our hands. There’s not solid evidence that money has an impact in this way.”
I think that there were a variety of reasons that the findings were so mixed in part due to poor methodological choices, poor research designs. We’ve gotten a lot better about things like determining causality and tricky situations like that since then, and there have been more recent studies. The one I like the most is by Linda Powell, The Influence of Campaign Contributions in State Legislatures, although she’s far from the only one that have more consistently shown at least some degree of influence for money.
I don’t want to say that this debate has been completely resolved. I think there’s still really important work to do here. And actually I do have some, at least one ongoing project where I’m applying some new causal inference tools to this question. But for this particular book, I didn’t want to wade in that quagmire. I didn’t feel like the data and the theory lent itself to answering-
I didn’t feel like the data and the theory lent itself to answering those questions very well. So I sort of focused on some different consequences that fundraising might have outside of this influence question. Now with that being said, I would offer that based on the theory that I present in the book, this idea that party fundraising systems push legislators to raise as much money as possible. And the way that they do that is spending time on the phone with donors, holding meetings with them, talking to them at these social events. There certainly is a mechanism there via which this could result in legislators giving more consideration of and potentially passing legislation more in favor of those with money to try and secure these resources.
So I think there’s a solid reason to believe ex-ante that there might be more influence for moneyed interests in legislatures where party fundraising takes hold and becomes this predominant concern. I just don’t have good data to speak to that question because measuring something like influence is really challenging for some of those reasons that I pointed to earlier. Despite that, I think it’s really important to note that setting aside this question of does fundraising demands lead to more influence for these moneyed interests, does it detract from our institution’s ability to sort of address policy issues in law? I think that’s a really important concern in and of itself.
I think we all have a stake in having political institutions that can respond to the problems that emerge. Certainly in recent years, there’s no shortage, new issues, new sort of policy debates on things like AI and how to deal with things like tariffs and de-industrialization and so on. There’s all sorts of debates that we’ve had that require some form of attention, I think would be an agreement across the political aisle. And if our legislatures are less able to rise to those challenges because members are spending all their time raising money, I think that’s something that we should be concerned about in and of itself. And that’s sort of the argument that I make in the book.
Matt Grossmann: So your implications are also distinct from, but maybe closer to what I would, I guess characterize as the rising interest in money and politics, which is about its effect on potential candidates or the sort of stream of people getting into the political process that it is a way of turning off a lot of people from getting involved and to maybe advantaging people like lawyers or business people with more built-in early money advantages. So it seems like your findings might help kind of extend that literature, or at least say that maybe these dynamics are likely to get worse in terms of the amount that it really is diverting people who might be interested in legislative work. So connect those literatures to your own findings.
Michael Kistner: Yeah, it’s very relevant to mine and I touch on it a little bit in the book, at least in the discussion. So I have quotes from legislators themselves who talk about this as being a barrier that keeps people from running for office. I have one legislator that I quote in the book who says, there’s a lot of really good folks who I talk to who might otherwise be interested in running for public office, but they tell me, I don’t want to go to Washington DC and become a high-priced telemarketer for crying sakes. I have better things to do with my time. And so that’s concerning from the perspective as we see this shift from policy-making is the primary focus to fundraising the types of people who care really deeply about policy and trying to address some of these things make society better through the enactment of laws they’re choosing not to run where they otherwise might.
And so that’s something where I don’t have hard data on that. Understanding the latent preferences of people who might but do not run for office. A really tricky thing to get at, but certainly at least anecdotally and theoretically, the dynamics that I’m describing here, this reorientation towards raising as much money as possible is hurting us in terms of recruitment. Now here might also be worth connecting another recent literature on money and politics that has become very prevalent over the last several years, and it’s a focus on the rise of small dollar donations facilitated in large part by some technological developments like the development of these big conduits like Win Red or Act Blue that make it as easy as pulling up a link and putting your credit card information in and all of a sudden you can really easily give money in response to an email or text message that you may have received.
So I don’t spend a terrible amount of time in the book focusing on that aspect of fundraising just because I think in the book about two separate forms of fundraising from big dollar donors versus fundraising from small dollar donors. A lot of the solicitations that lead to small dollar donations are the types of tasks that can be done by staff people other than the legislators themselves. You can sort of delegate those tasks downwards, have them craft the emails, the text messages, post on social media in ways that might accrue donations. Whereas what I’m really concerned for most of the focus of this book is what about those tasks that legislators have to do themselves and for meeting with the business owner who can cut the really large check, that’s something you can’t send a staffer to do in your place. The lawmaker has to go and give that person time themselves in order to get the big money.
So I’m not as focused on small dollar donations in the book. That said, I think there are also reasons to be concerned about increased fundraising demands, pushing members to also do more of this small dollar fundraising, even if it’s mostly their staffers who are doing it. I actually have some other work co-authored with a PhD candidate here at the University of Houston, David J. Hilden. There’s an article that was recently released in the Quarterly journal of Political Science Promoting Conspiracy Theories Strategically where we show that one of the reasons why politicians sometimes promote conspiracy theories things like stolen elections or sabotage vote by mail systems is because promoting those things on social media can result in an influx of campaign contributions. And so there’s a financial incentive to sort of find issues like that that really get partisans blood boiling and mobilizes them to take actions that support the politicians.
So I would say at a very broad level, one thing I can say about my book is anytime you increase fundraising demands, how important it is for legislators themselves, you’re going to push them to do more of the sorts of activities that lead to more money being raised. And there’s all sorts of reasons why I think we should be cautious about the incentive structures that creates the actions in politics that raise the most money are not necessarily the actions that voters would most prioritize if you simply asked them what they wanted politicians to be doing, if you ask them on a survey, for instance.
Matt Grossmann: So I know the legal changes that you use as instruments for this are across the parties. Both parties have to abide by the rules, but you certainly hear from partisans that their opponents are doing something very different in their fundraising than we are or we’re falling behind. So I just wanted to hear about the party dynamics here. Is it the case that when the Alabama leader comes to power that the Democrats automatically and immediately respond in kind or do we really have sometimes each party moving in a slightly different direction here and it is, are the same dynamics and consequences occurring regardless of whether Republicans or Democrats are?
Michael Kistner: This is a really good question and I’m glad that you asked this, Matt, because it gets at the prospects for reform and change and how we might get out of the situation that we’re in. So to address the most specific component of your question in a case like Alabama, I spent a lot of time both earlier in my answer to you and in the book, focusing on what’s happening on the Republican side of the aisle by leaders like Mike Hubbard and then the institutions they’re implementing. But we do see a response from Democrats and where Republicans step up their fundraising and Democrats in return increase their fundraising as well, and they’re implementing some of these similar institutions, some of these similar sticks and carrots to try and keep up.
In general what I find is that, well, there’s some differences between parties, in large part when one party increases the amount of party fundraising they’re engaged in, the other party responds to try and contest elections and not be left behind, not be left in the dust. And you hear if you speak to members about this, this being a rationale that leaders give for getting them to engage in these activities that they find distasteful that they don’t like doing.
But in addition to the incentive structure, part of the more informal are here’s the rationale, here’s why we have to do these things. Leaders point that sort of keeping up with the other party. So what’s so interesting about this is oftentimes you see these increases, pretty drastic increases in some cases in the amount of party fundraising that goes on, but it’s all aimed at capturing majority status winning elections. And it’s met by the other party in a way that ends up canceling out. The two parties went from a lower level of fundraising where they were more or less on a stable basis to a much higher level where they’re still more or less at a stable basis and neither party has the advantage.
So I sort of in the book, I draw the metaphor of this having some similarities with an arms race, sort of a prisoner’s dilemma situation where, well, if the other country is building up their nuclear stockpile, we also have to build up our nuclear stockpile. And you end up in a place where instead of both countries having a few nukes, both countries have a large number of nukes, but they’re still at an equal standing. The problem with this situation is as the book gets into, there’s all sorts of costs and there’s all sorts of negative consequences associated with this increase, even though it doesn’t end up actually giving parties an edge.
So I think there’s reasons leaders like the status quo, but for rank and file legislators, I think there’s really strong arguments that they would be better off in a world in which both parties could together somehow commit to some reform that would reduce the incentive to fundraise or remove it entirely, something like a session restriction on fundraising for instance. You’d end up in a similar place in terms of which party has an edge, but you wouldn’t have to be spending all this time raising money and talking to these donors and begging them for bucks. And so I think the partisan differences, I don’t see much of it, and I think that’s a really strong argument to be made that, hey, maybe we should reconsider this situation and think about some forms that might ameliorate some of these pressures.
Matt Grossmann: There’s a lot more to learn. The Science of Politics is available bi-weekly from the Niskanen Center, and I’m your host, Matt Grossmann. If you liked this discussion, here are the episodes you should check out next, all linked on our website, How Donor Opinion Distorts American Democracy, How Campaign Money Changes Elections Before and After Citizens United, Why Presidents Still Spend Their Time Raising Money, How the Money Chase Governs our Elections, and Is Democracy Declining in the American States. Thanks to Michael Kistner for joining me. Please check out Paying for the Party and then listen in next time.
