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Public Campaign Financing, Candidate Socioeconomic Diversity, and Representational Inequality at the U.S. State Level: Evidence from Connecticut

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 January 2021

Mitchell Kilborn
Mitchell Kilborn*
Affiliation:
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA
*
Mitchell Kilborn, Department of Government, Harvard University, 1737 Cambridge St., Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. Email: mitchell.kilborn@gmail.com
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Abstract

Conventional wisdom holds that public campaign financing can diversify the socioeconomic makeup of candidate pools and, therefore, of U.S. elected officials, which could make U.S. public policy more responsive to lower socioeconomic status (SES) citizens. I argue that in addition to the absence of a positive relationship between public financing and candidate socioeconomic diversity, public financing, depending on the program design, may, in fact, reduce candidate socioeconomic diversity. Using occupational data on state legislative candidates in public financing state Connecticut and two paired control states to execute a difference in difference analysis, I demonstrate that when public financing is available, fewer low SES candidates run for state legislative office, and those who do run are not more likely to win and are less likely to utilize public financing.

Keywords

campaign financepolitical behaviorpolitical participationrepresentationlegislative electionslegislative politicselectionselection rulespoverty/inequalitypublic policy
Type
Research Article
Information
State Politics & Policy Quarterly , Volume 18 , Issue 3 , September 2018 , pp. 296 - 323
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2018

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