The Wisconsin Campaign Finance Project

The goals of the project are to measure the impact of “clean elections” programs on state politics, and provide empirically-based analysis to policy makers in the design and implementation of publicly-funded campaign finance programs. Although taxpayer funded elections are an increasingly common and popular campaign finance reform, policy makers have almost no guidance to help them make decisions about how to construct optimal programs. The clean elections movement is in part motivated by axioms about the political process: that the need to raise funds deters many candidates from emerging; that candidates need protection against independent expenditures and issue ads; that driving private money out of campaigns will make legislatures more responsive to public needs (as opposed to the requests of special interests). While these are without a doubt reasonable conclusions, they have not been subjected to rigorous analysis and testing.