The Democracy Fund approved two new research grants earlier this year that will help us to better understand more about how certain campaign finance reforms work in practice, as well as the potential role of technology to improve the regulation of campaign financing. A $300,000 grant to researchers from Fordham University, Columbia University, and Binghamton University will support an innovative set of field experiments that aim to shed new light on the relationship between money and our political system, as well as how well reforms like increased disclosure and the use of public funds to match small donations work. The Democracy Fund chose to support this research because we believe that the data on many critical questions about money in politics remain unclear. The unique application of field experiments offer reformers, policy makers, and the courts with definitive answers to some of these questions that lie at the heart of current legislative and judicial debates. The two-year research project is led by Professors Don Green of Columbia University, Costas Panagopoulos of Fordham University, and Jonathan Krasno of Binghamton University. Green is a leading pioneer in the application of field experiments to the realm of elections, campaigns, and our democracy. A $50,000 grant to Reinvent Albany will support research into how regulators in New York State could use technology to modernize the reporting and compliance of campaign finance contributions under a proposed small-donor matching system that is being considered in Albany. Working with a team of local technologists and experts, the Reinvent Albany team will assess the needs of candidates, regulators, and the public as it develops recommendations for how technology may be able to streamline the process, encourage greater accountability, and foster a stronger campaign finance system The Democracy Fund chose to support this research project because we believe it will offer unique insight into the bipartisan application of technology to improve how our campaign finance system operates. In the coming months, we look forward to updating you on the progress of these two exciting new grants.
Focus Area: Elections
Guest Post: The Oregon Citizens’ Initiative Review
Local and statewide initiatives and referenda give citizens the opportunity to vote directly on legislation, but voters often lack the information they need to make informed choices. The State of Oregon has created a potential remedy for this situation, called the Citizens Initiative Review (CIR), which convenes a group of average citizens together to evaluate ballot measures and share their recommendations with the voting public. Healthy Democracy, the innovative organization behind the CIR, is a grantee of the Democracy Fund. My colleagues and I recently completed an evaluation of the 2012 CIR process in order to understand its quality and impact. Last fall, the CIR Commission, which was established by the Governor in 2011, convened panels of 24 randomly-selected, demographically representative Oregon citizens to spend a full week examining two different ballot measures. One initiative proposed reforming the corporate tax system and the other would have authorized the construction of private casinos in Oregon. At the end of their deliberations, each panel produced a one page CIR Citizens’ Statement that went into the official Voter’s Pamphlet that the state mailed to every registered Oregon voter. The panels’ judgments ultimately matched the election outcomes, with voters ending a corporate tax refund and declining to authorize private casinos. Among other things, our research team found that:
- A majority of Oregon voters were aware of the CIR.
- Roughly two-thirds of those who read the CIR Statements found them helpful when deciding how to vote.
- Those who read a CIR Statement learned more about the ballot measures than those who read other portions of the official Voter’s Guide.
For me, the most interesting finding is the impact of the CIR on voter knowledge. As the CIR Commission’s webpage explains, the Oregon process “is an innovative way of publicly evaluating ballot measures so voters have clear, useful, and trustworthy information at election time.” So, we wanted to find out whether the CIR actually does increase voter knowledge and voters’ confidence in the facts that they learn.
To answer that question, we chose to conduct an online survey. When contacted in the final weeks before the election, some survey respondents were shown a CIR Statement and others were shown nothing. We then asked respondents to assess whether 10 factual statements pertinent to the ballot measure were true or false. Respondents frequently expressed uncertainty and chose the “don’t know” response, but many did claim to know whether each statement “definitely” or “probably” was true or false. Those who read the CIR Statement outperformed the control group on nine of the ten knowledge items. Those who had read the CIR recommendations answered, on average, twice as many knowledge items correctly—again, with “don’t know” responses being more common that inaccurate ones. Real Oregon voters who had not yet read the Voters’ Pamphlet gained more knowledge from reading the CIR Statement than from either equivalent doses of paid pro/con arguments or the official Explanatory and Fiscal statements.
You can download the full report to learn more about our evaluation findings. Though the Oregon CIR is not a panacea for all of the weaknesses of the initiative and referendum system, our findings—along with those from our 2010 evaluation report—do support the view that everyday citizens can produce high-quality deliberation on complex policies and give their peers accurate and useful information to consider before voting. Moreover, it’s clear that by distributing those results through the official Voter’s Guide, the Oregon CIR reaches and influences large numbers of voters in Oregon. Yale democratic theorist Robert Dahl wrote in On Democracy (1998),
One of the imperative needs of democratic countries is to improve citizens’ capacities to engage intelligently in political life . . . In the years to come . . . older institutions will need to be enhanced by new means for civic education, political participation, information, and deliberation that draw creatively on the array of techniques and technologies available in the twenty-first century.
The Oregon CIR appears to be one such institution, ingeniously using citizens themselves to inform the judgments of their peers. The one hitch is that the CIR does not receive any state funds, so it remains unclear whether it will continue to thrive—or spread to other states—in future years. John Gastil (jgastil@psu.edu) is Professor and Head of the Department of Communication Arts and Sciences at Pennsylvania State University and the Director of the Penn State Democracy Institute. His most recent books include the co-edited volume Democracy in Motion: Evaluating the Practice and Impact of Deliberative Civic Engagement and The Jury and Democracy, both by Oxford University Press.