Free Donations and Unequal Participation: Seattle’s Democracy Vouchers

• In Event: Information and Political Engagement

Abstract

In the November 2015 election, Seattleites approved the “Honest Elections Seattle" Initiative (I-122). This changed how Seattle municipal campaigns could be financed, and most notably, introduced the Democracy Voucher program. The Democracy Voucher program, first in the nation of its kind, aimed to take big money out of the municipal election process by a two-fold process. First, it enabled candidates to tap into a publicly financed election system in exchange for accepting lower contribution limits. Second, and more radically, the Democracy Voucher program mailed $100 worth of vouchers to all Seattleites with an active voter registration, spendable in $25 increments on municipal elections (City Council and City Attorney in 2017 and 2019, with the addition of Mayor come 2021). Candidates tap into public financing after receiving a qualifying amount of cash donations and signatures, and campaigns directly receive the cash equivalent of the vouchers received. I-122's aims include “giving more people an opportunity to have their voices heard in democracy" and “expand[ing] the pool of candidates for City offices." Proponents of the initiative advocated that this program would “encourage a more diverse pool of candidates" and that “not just the wealthy and political elite" would be able to make their voices heard.

Participation in campaign finance in federal elections is known to be dominated by those belonging to overrepresented groups and those with higher levels of financial means, and the same holds for municipal elections as well. Past research has shown that disproportionate participation in campaign finance has implications on the types of candidates who run and the types of candidates who can become electorally competitive.

What happens when the financial barriers to participate in campaign finance are removed? Do donor pools become more equal or do they continue to perpetuate inequalities in political participation? This paper answers these questions by utilizing individual-level voter data combined with administrative donation records from 2005 to 2019.

With a dataset comprising of all Seattle residents who have lived in the same zip code in the period of study (and are subsequently all eligible to participate in local campaign finance for the entirety of 2005-2019), I construct a time series comprising of their demographic attributes, participation in federal elections, and federal and local campaign finance activity. Using a difference-in-differences design, I measure the proportion increase in political participation as a result of the availability of Democracy Vouchers across demographic groups.

Across age, income, race, political party, ideology, and previous political participation, I find that when Democracy Vouchers are introduced, those already dominant within municipal campaign finance (older, richer, white, Democratic, liberal, frequent past participants) not only maintain, but actually widen their dominance against groups underrepresented in the donor pool. Only in the case of sex, where females were slightly underrepresented in the donor pool prior to the rollout of Democracy Vouchers, does an underrepresented group achieve (or overtake) parity. Even when controlling for demographic attributes, the marginal effect of being nonwhite, non-Democratic, an infrequent participant, or lower income is negative, indicating that these disparities are not due simply to confounding as a result of correlated demographics.

Last, I explore two reasons for why these inequalities persist after the introduction of Democracy Vouchers. First, potential donors may not be interested in the current slate of candidates. Especially in the case of women, people of color, and women of color, underrepresented individuals are more likely to donate when demographically similar candidates are running. Beyond age and income (both identities much weaker than race and gender), candidates who utilized Democracy Vouchers are not yet significantly different from those in the pre-voucher years, and it is possible that only when there is an increase of underrepresented candidates will non-donors become motivated to participate. Second, as the Democracy Voucher program is relatively new, knowledge about its existence and knowledge about ways to utilize Democracy Vouchers have possibly not entered the collective conscious yet. Knowledge may be asymmetrically distributed, skewed in favor of those who pay more attention to the local news, such as the educated and native English speakers, or to those who receive more political contact from candidates, such as those who live in single-family homes instead of apartments.

Author

• Chenoa Yorgason, Stanford University