CFI:
The Campaign Finance Institute (CFI) has released a major new study of public campaign financing in the City of Los Angeles, co-authored by Michael J. Malbin and Michael Parrott. Malbin is CFI’s co-founder and executive director as well as Professor of Political Science at the University at Albany (SUNY). Parrott is a Research Analyst at CFI who completed his Ph.D. at the University of Maryland in May 2016. He will be an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow in 2016-17.

Los Angeles is one of about a dozen cities in the United States to offer candidates partial or full public financing for municipal elections. Some form of a mixed private-public system has been in effect since 1990, but the city in 2013 increased the public matching fund rate from the old one-for-one match for the first $250 a donor gives to a candidate, to a two-tiered system that offers a two-to-one match in primaries and four-to-one in general elections.

With two elections under the new system’s belt, CFI compared the elections preceding the change (2009 and 2011) to the two elections after (2013 and 2015). The report focuses on the role of small donors because the City’s Charter declares increasing their role to be one of the goals of public financing. The study found that the current two-tiered system hasnot increased either the number or proportional importance of small donors in city elections.

After the 2015 election, the Los Angeles City Ethics Commission recommended six-to-one matching for both primary and general elections. Because the proposed rate would make the Los Angeles system similar to New York City’s, the CFI report estimates the potential impact of this new proposal by comparing pre-reform and post-reform elections in both cities. (It also checks the results in an Appendix by using a more complex research design that controls for the many differences between the two cities.)

The comparative analysis concludes that the commission’s recommendationswould be likely to enhance the role of small donors to city council candidates. However, achieving the same results for mayoral candidates may require stronger incentives. Recommendations are detailed in the full report, which is available here.

The study also documents the positive impact matching funds in both cities have in increasing the economic and racial diversity of the neighborhoods in which small donors reside.