Campaign Finance Reform: The Unfinished Agenda

In 1974, following the Watergate scandal, Congress enacted major campaign finance reform legislation. The legislation created a revolutionary new public financing system for our presidential campaigns, but it left congressional campaigns to be financed totally by private money. The presidential public financing system has worked well. Despite some incremental problems, the system has accomplished its basic goal of allowing individuals to run for the presidency without becoming dependent on their financial backers. The system for financing congressional cam paigns, on the other hand, is out of control and in need of fundamental reform. The inappropriate role of special interest political action commit tees (PACs) in influencing congressional elections and congressional decisions is the single biggest problem facing the political process. Congress needs to complete the unfinished campaign finance reform agenda of the 1970s by enacting public financing for congressional campaigns and establishing new restrictions on the total amount that PACs may give to a congressional candidate.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/67356/2/10.1177_000271628648600107.pd

Quasi-Experimental Analysis of Targeted Economic Development Programs: Lessons from Florida

The authors highlight three sources of endogeneity bias that typically haunt analyses of local government policies, and offer an empirical methodology for estimating program impacts given such concerns. They investigate Florida’s experience with implementing two common targeted economic development policies, community redevelopment areas (CRAs) and enterprise zones (EZs). Developing a simple application decision model as a guide, they find significant differences in policy implementation for small cities compared with larger cities. Florida’s small-city program implementation offers a unique opportunity to compare areas that received state-level approval for the programs with all areas that qualified for but did not receive designation using a quasi-experimental framework. In so doing, the authors explicitly address the potential for endogeneity bias caused by programrationing on the part of administrators and by nonrandom targeting of distressed areas. Consistent with existing research, they do not find evidence validating the efficacy of targeted development programs for small cities.Yeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline