In the Shadows of Sunlight: The Effects of Transparency on State Political Campaigns

Authors

Abby K. Wood, University of Southern California Gould School of Law
Douglas M. Spencer, University of Colorado Law SchoolFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication

Election Law Journal

Year

2016

Citation Information

Abby K. Wood and Douglas M. Spencer, In the Shadows of Sunlight: The Effects of Transparency on State Political Campaigns, 15 Election L.J. 302 (2016), available at https://scholar.law.colorado.edu/faculty-articles/1361.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1089/elj.2016.0365

Abstract

In recent years, the courts have invalidated a variety of campaign finance laws while simultaneously upholding disclosure requirements. Courts view disclosure as a less-restrictive means to root out corruption while critics claim that disclosure chills speech and deters political participation. Using individual-level contribution data from state elections between 2000 and 2008, we find that the speech-chilling effects of disclosure are negligible. On average, less than one donor per candidate is likely to stop contributing when the public visibility of campaign contributions increases. Moreover, we do not observe heterogeneous effects for small donors or ideological outliers despite an assumption in First Amendment jurisprudence that these donors are disproportionately affected by campaign finance regulations. In short, the argument that disclosure chills speech is not strongly supported by the data.

Comments

"© Abby K. Wood and Douglas M. Spencer, 2016; Published by Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. This Open Access article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited."

Copyright Statement

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