Money Talks: The Impact of Citizens United on State Elections

Tilman Klumpp (), Hugo Mialon () and Michael Williams ()

No 2012-18, Working Papers from University of Alberta, Department of Economics

Abstract: The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that restrictions on independent political expenditures by corporations and labor unions are unconstitutional on First Amendment grounds (Citizens United v. FEC, 2010). In this paper, we test the hypothesis that the decision gave an electoral boost to Republicans, at the expense of Democrats. The 50 states provide an ideal testing ground for this hypothesis. The ruling only affected a subset of states since the majority of states already had no restrictions on independent expenditures, allowing us to obtain difference-in-differences estimates of the short term effects of the ruling on electoral advantage. We find that Citizens United had a positive and statistically significant effect of approximately seven percentage points on the probability of Republicans winning in state congressional elections.

Keywords: Citizens United; independent expenditures; state elections; congressional races; campaign contributions; campaign finance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 K19 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 27 pages
Date: 2012-08-01, Revised 2012-09-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-pol
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ris:albaec:2012_018

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