There has been a marked increase of debate in the months since the Supreme Court’s April 2014 decision in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission over the relationship between interest group spending and the power of political parties. A just-published article in THE FORUM: A JOURNAL OF APPLIED RESEARCH IN CONTEMPORARY POLITICS speaks directly to some of the assumptions underlying that debate. The article – entitled Independent Spending in State Elections, 2006-2010: Vertically Networked Political Parties Were the Real Story, Not Business – is based on a fresh analysis of data supplied by the National Institute on Money in State Politics. This analysis challenges public expectations about business power that were prevalent in the immediate period after Citizens United. It also challenges more recent assumptions that seem to see parties and interest groups as locked in a zero-sum battle for power.
The article’s co-authors are Keith E. Hamm, Edwards Professor of Government, Rice University; Michael J. Malbin, CFI’s Executive Director and Professor of Political Science at the University at Albany, SUNY; Jaclyn J. Kettler, Rice University; and Brendan Glavin, The Campaign Finance Institute.
A final pre-publication version can be read here. The article’s abstract appears below.
ABSTRACT: This article examines independent spending in state elections before and after the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. FEC. We find that the decision did not have much of a direct effect on business spending, despite public expectations…. [T]he major growth was not in the business or labor sectors, but in the networked organizations of political parties — and most particularly the national organizations of state elected and party officials. Contrary to some contemporary views, these developments cannot be understood as a displacement of within-state money from parties to interest groups. Instead, national party organizations were operating across state lines, deciding whether to contribute to formal party committees or their party allies as local circumstances might dictate. This complex movement of money belies any theorizing that would treat a decline in the proportional role of formal party spending as equivalent to a zero-sum increase in the power of non-party interest groups. Rather, we see the pattern of independent spending as part of a larger story of change in American political parties. These changes now include vertically networked parties operating across levels of jurisdiction, alongside the horizontal networks receiving attention in recent scholarship.