All Issue Ads

All Issue Ads

The Future of Campaign Finance Reform Laws in the Courts and in Congress

All Issue Ads.

All Issue Ads.

All Issue Ads

Psychosomatic Medicine: July/August 2014 - Volume 76 - Issue 6 - doi: 10.1097/01.psy.0000453067.18647.ad

All Issue Ads

In December 2003, the United States Supreme Court upheld all the key provisions of the Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act (BCRA) of 2002. In their 5-4 decision, the justices deferred broadly to the limitations set by Congress on unregulated “soft money” and “issue ads” in political campaigns. Derek Langhauser, who worked in Senator Olympia Snow’s office as counsel in McConnell v FEC, as this case was called, gives a legal history of the challenge of balancing Congress’ interest in protecting the integrity of elections with the Constitution’s competitive rights of free speech and association. He describes in detail the Supreme Court’s decision, the implications of the decision, and the role of the Court in representative democracy.

U.S. campaign finance regulation is currently in bad shape. The combination of congressional inaction, regulatory ineffectiveness, and constitutional constraint perpetuates a status quo that no one intended and many deplore. Public financing for presidential elections is effectively dead, while Super PACs and other forms of independent spending are on the rise. The 501(c)(4) nonprofit disclosure rules are very leaky, allowing corporations and others to conceal soft money contributions to Super PACs if they so choose. The Supreme Court has effectively precluded comprehensive campaign finance reform by its rulings, which have thrown out independent and personal expenditure bans, limited public finance to opt-in schemes, loosened the definition of issue ads, and allowed corporations to use unlimited amounts of their treasury monies to fund independent campaigns. To borrow from Vladimir Lenin, “[W]hat is to be done?”

One of These Ads Is Not Like the Other: Viewer Inability to Differentiate Issue Ads from Candidate Ads

Online advertising is an important component of political campaigning. With microtargeting techniques, voter groups who have shared concerns about specific issues can be identified and, subsequently, targeted with posts addressing those issues. This paper aims to provide an initial investigation into the dynamics and effects of targeted issue ads. We study whether these targeted persuasion efforts influence which issues matter to voters and, vice versa, if voters are more likely to receive ads about issues that they deem important. We take a comparative approach by collecting data in the run-up to the 2021 Dutch general election ( N = 103) and during the 2022 United States midterm election ( N = 31). To test the effects of ads that individual voters were exposed to during these times, we use a novel combination of methods, namely, mobile experience sampling, screenshot data donations, and content analysis. In both countries, we find that exposure to online ads increases the salience of issues among voters. We did not find evidence for successful targeting on issue preferences in the United States or the Netherlands. We discuss possible explanations and implications of these findings.

The Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 addressed two issues, soft money and independent expenditures on issue ads for electoral advocacy. The Supreme Court initially upheld most provisions in 2003 but subsequently weakened and struck down provisions on independent expenditures. I examine the stock value of firms with a long history of campaign contributions around the key developments of three Supreme Court cases. Stock prices of contributing firms react positively to Court events associated with campaign finance deregulation. It implies that the average rates of return to these rights of political spending are between 1 and 2% of stock values.

This chapter explores the place of toy guns in the dream lives of American boys. What few mainstream pundits seem willing to discuss is the role, in America’s gun violence, of the radically deregulated capitalism championed for decades by neoliberal economists and conservative ideologues. What Ayn Rand would call the virtuous selfishness of winner-take-all capitalism insists on profit maximization at any cost. It is the reason why the gun industry spends millions in lobbying, campaign contributions, and issue ads to thwart gun control. The paranoid style in American politics is also part of the psychotic equation of gun culture. It is no coincidence that America leads the industrialized world in gun violence, and American children are eleven times more likely than children in other developed countries to die in a gun accident.