Reform Interrupted? State Innovation, Court Decisions, and the Past and Future of Campaign Finance Reform in the States

As politics and policymaking appear to increasingly benefit “special interests” rather than the mass public, reformers, politicians, and the public have often embraced campaign finance reform. Nationally, this was most visible in the McCain-Feingold Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act (2002), but a number of states have undertaken major overhauls of their campaign finance systems in recent decades. In this article we discuss these changes to state campaign finance law since the early 1990s. In the process, we update and validate Witko's (2005) measure of state campaign finance stringency for the period of 1992 to 2012. In the last part of the article, we discuss what effect recent U.S. Supreme Court and state court rulings will have on future reform efforts.