Billy Shinn

Date of Award

2015

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Social Sciences

First Advisor

Reilly, Jack

Keywords

United States, Campaign Finance Reform, Government, Politics

Area of Concentration

Political Science

Abstract

In recent years, the state of the American campaign finance system has been a salient concern both in academic and popular discourse. Despite an overwhelming perception held by American citizens that “the system” is broken by money that leaves candidates for political office beholden to external interests, no noteworthy attempts to address the issue exist in the U.S. Congress as of this writing. Normative implications aside, several prominent examples of successful campaign finance reform exist in American history, leading to an obvious question: why then and not now? Focusing on the decision-making of members of the 107th Congress, this study utilized several independent variables to ask that question, trying to determine which factors correlated to legislator vote choice on the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, an example of successful campaign finance reform. Given this data, I ran a logistic regression and concluded that a legislator’s DW-Nominate score matters far more than other factors (a legislator’s party, seniority, fundraising success, or partisan lean of state) in predictions of vote choice.

Download

Share

COinS