Study Finds Little Interest in Campaign Finance Reform

Study Finds Little Interest in Campaign Finance Reform

NewsMax.com Wires
Thursday, Feb. 1, 2001

WASHINGTON – The Cato Institute says a new study it has conducted indicates that there is little public support for campaign finance reform, and that extravagant campaign spending does not cause Americans to feel cynical about politics.

"Yes, citizens' trust in government is low, and yes, campaign spending has been increasing at a rapid pace," says Cato author David M. Primo in "Public Opinion and Campaign Finance." "However, if we examine the relationship between trust in government and overall spending, no relationship exists."

For starters, the major decline in public trust occurred before the run-up in campaign spending, says Primo, a doctoral candidate in political science at Stanford University. That, he says, makes it hard to claim that increased spending caused mistrust toward government.

Primo also says that during the period that campaign spending has been rising, public trust in government has fluctuated, contradicting reformers who allege that campaign spending and public cynicism toward politics rise in tandem.

"Since the early 1980s, citizen mistrust of government has risen and fallen," Primo says. "So we cannot say, overall, that mistrust has increased over the past two decades. That indicates that rising campaign spending has not been associated with rising mistrust of government." In fact, by Primo's calculation, the correlation between campaign spending and trust in government is -.027, or, in statistical terms, close to zero.

Nor, he says, is the public clamoring for campaign-finance legislation. "In poll after poll, campaign finance is near the bottom of the list of important issues alongside world peace and homelessness," he says, calling the public's response to the issue a "collective yawn."

As a result, Primo cautions policymakers – such as Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who has reintroduced his campaign finance legislation, claiming broad public support to reform a system that breeds mistrust of government – to be wary of carving out space on the legislative agenda for campaign finance reform. "The legislative priorities of the new administration should come before consideration of new campaign finance regulations," he says.

Primo's study can be found at http://www.cato.org/pubs/briefs/bp-060es.html