Abstract
Disclosure requirements under US federal campaign finance laws and subsequent court rulings have created greater transparency into the financing of campaigns that allow election watchdog groups to monitor and track the flow of money to and by outside groups. These requirements also have generated an extensive new source of quantitative data for scholars to use. Because of the substantial increase in spending by outside groups, it is both timely and important to examine the influence of independent expenditures on election outcomes, political behavior, and fairness in the democratic process. To evaluate and understand the impact of this spending, researchers must be aware of the scope and limitations of the campaign finance data collected by the Federal Election Commission (FEC). This article provides scholars who would like to use FEC data to answer some of these questions with an introduction to the data source, a discussion of how other scholars have used the data, and a case study to generate guidance on the challenges and potential solutions associated with accessing and analyzing these data.
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Notes
In this article, references to outside groups exclude spending by political parties.
Center for Responsive Politics (Open Secrets) at http://www.opensecrets.org/; Ballotpedia at https://ballotpedia.org/Main_Page; the Campaign Finance Institute at http://www.cfinst.org/; the Center for Public Integrity at https://publicintegrity.org/; FollowTheMoney and the National Institute on Money in State Politics at https://www.followthemoney.org/; The Brennan Center for Justice at https://www.brennancenter.org/; the Sunlight Foundation at https://sunlightfoundation.com/; and Common Cause at https://www.commoncause.org/.
Gulati (2012) finds that in 2012 the large majority of super PAC contributions supporting Romney’s campaign came from individuals, not corporations. While labor unions were more active contributors to Democratic-oriented super PACs, they did not spend much more than in previous elections.
In the House files for 2016, there were 60,000 unique entries.
Williams and Gulati (2017) reports our full independent expenditure analysis for the 2016 presidential election.
Williams and Gulati (2017) reports our full analysis of the breakdown of outside group media expenditures by candidate.
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Cases
Buckley v. Valeo. 1976. 424 U.S. 1.
Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. 2010. 558 U.S. 310.
SpeechNOW.org v. Federal Election Commission. 2010. 599 F.3d 686.
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Williams, C.B., Gulati, J. & Zeglen, M. Following the money: uses and limitations of FEC campaign finance data. Int Groups Adv 9, 317–329 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41309-020-00096-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41309-020-00096-8