“Unlimited party fundraising and spending gives you less polarized legislatures? Discuss.”

Ray LaRaja and Brian Schaffner write at The Monkey Cage:

Lee Drutman’s recent Monkey Cage piece challenges a finding from our forthcoming book, Campaign Finance and Political Polarization:When Purists Prevail. That is, that states that allow parties to raise and spend unlimited amounts of money tend to have less polarized legislatures. This finding has important implications for how we regulate money in politics. Thus, it is not surprising that the finding is attracting challenges from reform circles.

In this post, we will briefly identify problems with Drutman’s analysis. We will then describe in greater detail why we think we are on solid empirical footing in concluding that removing campaign finance limits on parties may help to reduce how polarized our politics currently appear.

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