First Amendment and Campaigns: More Campaign Speech Benefits Voters

January 1, 2018  •  By IFS Staff  •    •  

At the heart of the First Amendment is the assumption that Americans are best served by a full and free discussion of whom to elect. The American system of government sits atop the bedrock of the First Amendment. From the pamphleteering of the founding era to the Facebook ads of today, political campaigns have been premised upon free and open…

Aggregate Effects of Large-Scale Campaigns on Voter Turnout

November 1, 2014   •  By Matt Nese   •  ,

To what extent do political campaigns mobilize voters? Despite the central role of campaigns in American politics and despite many experiments on campaigning, we know ...

A Teaching Moment

Default Article
October 16, 2014   •  By Luke Wachob   •  

The Politico political cartoon “Equal access” offers a window into the way many people assume campaign contributions and campaign finance laws generally work. The ...

Reform and the Insider’s Game

Default Article
October 14, 2014   •  By Brad Smith   •  

One of the problems that the regulatory movement has never come to grips with is the cognitive dissonance between decrying the influence of traditional ...

Highlights: "How we finance our political campaigns"

Default Article
October 14, 2014   •  By Joe Trotter   •  

Center for Competitive Politics Chairman Bradley A. Smith recently participated in the American Forum debate, “How we finance our political campaigns.” In this collection ...

Money in Politics: What’s the Problem?

Default Article
October 6, 2014   •  By Joe Trotter   •  

Is “campaign finance reform” a good way to regulate money in politics? Nationally syndicated, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and best-selling author George Will shows that, ...

O’Keefe v. Chisholm

dft
September 30, 2014   •  By IFS staff   •  , , ,

In October of 2013 Wisconsin prosecutors, using the state’s John Doe statute that bars subpoena targets from disclosing the contents of the subpoena’s, launched ...

The wit and wisdom of Bernie Sanders

Default Article
September 11, 2014   •  By Brad Smith   •  

Bernie Sanders, the Socialist Senator from Vermont, was very upset today when his proposal to amend the Constitution to remove First Amendment protections from ...

The Udall Amendment: A Briefing Book

September 9, 2014   •  By Matt Nese   •  , ,

Senator Tom Udall’s (NM) S.J. Res. 19 would revoke nearly four decades of campaign finance jurisprudence from the Supreme Court and greatly reduce the quantity ...

The value of an endorsement

Default Article
August 30, 2014   •  By Brad Smith   •  

Former Iowa State Senator Kent Sorenson has pled guilty to falsifying campaign finance reports. Apparently, in 2008, an operative of Ron Paul’s presidential campaign, ...

15 Things Vox Forgot to Mention about “Money in Politics” (Part II)

Default Article
August 27, 2014   •  By Scott Blackburn   •  

Vox.com’s “40 charts that explain money in politics” fails miserably at, well, explaining money in politics. The charts seem to be less an explanation ...

Load more