On the Causes of Campaign Finance Reform: Power, Parties, and Ideology

Abstract

In this paper I present ideas on why reforms to campaign finance laws occur. In particular I focus on the conditions that are likely to foster or frustrate the enactment of laws that make elections more competitive (competition-enhancing reforms). This class of reforms holds normative significance; as prominent theorists emphasize, the competitiveness of elections is elemental to functioning democracy.1 Thus, I do not aim to present a theory to explain every type of reform - or even all of those reforms that may have consequences for the competitiveness of elections - but rather to present conjectures based on deductions from well known political science theories, which may (or may not) provide useful baselines for rigorous empirical investigations.