Yes, ‘Citizens United’ gives Republicans an electoral edge. Here’s proof. [View all]

[applegrove]

Yes, ‘Citizens United’ gives Republicans an electoral edge. Here’s proof.

by Tilman Klumpp, Hugo M. Mialon and Michael A. Williams at the Washington Post

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/yes-citizens-united-gives-republicans-an-electoral-edge-heres-proof/2016/04/07/c9fe3fa4-fb5c-11e5-886f-a037dba38301_story.html

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Unlike the federal government, some states never restricted independent political expenditures and were, therefore, unaffected by the Citizens United decision. Other states had restricted such expenditures and were forced to remove the restrictions after the ruling. In a study that will be published in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Law and Economics, we analyzed data from more than 38,000 state legislative races between 2000 and 2012, in both groups of states. Our objective was to figure out what impact, if any, Citizens United had on who gets elected to state legislative office. In states that previously banned corporate and union expenditures, we found that Citizens United shifted the odds of electoral success detectably and in a clear direction: from Democratic to Republican candidates.

Many things determine who wins on Election Day, and simple correlations don’t automatically indicate causal effects. States that were forced to lift their bans on independent expenditures may have elected more Republicans in 2010, but this surge could have been caused by a reaction to the passage of the Affordable Care Act, the recession or any other issue on voters’ minds at the time. And while states with independent expenditure bans may have elected more Democrats before 2010 than did states without such bans, this does not necessarily have anything to do with how the states regulated election finance. There are many reasons some states vote differently from others, including historical, cultural and demographic differences.


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