S5E05: Overturned Tables: Vouchers: Jen Heerwig

This is Larry Lessig. Every good idea needs to be tested. That's an uncomfortable truth, especially for academics, especially for legal academics, because testing is hard, or better testing well is hard. It's easy to have a theory about how things will work out. It's hard to work out whether that's in fact how things work. And that's true about even the most obvious ideas, like vouchers in particular or small dollar public funding in general. It's easy to identify the obvious good that would come from, say, small dollar public funding. Let's say through matching funds. With matching funds, the government gives a campaign a multiple of the amount the campaign has raised in small dollar contributions. So if the match is six to one, the campaign raises $100. The government would give the campaign another $600, and that means the $100 is actually worth $700 to the campaign. Now, obviously, that system makes it easier for campaigns to raise money in small dollar amounts. And obviously that means that more people can contribute to campaigns, making the few large funders what I called in the last episode, the Tweeds, less significant. Okay. But less obvious is how that change in the mix of contributions changes the overall influence of the money. What if the small dollar contributors are more polarized or more partisan than the big money it replaces? Does that make our politics more polarized? Okay, so some think so. I'm not convinced, but certainly there are prominent and respected academics who think so. But my objective here is not to resolve that point. It's instead to use that question to underline an obvious and critical point. Reform happens within a system, and that system has lots of moving parts, and shifting one part could easily affect others. And what we need to do is to step back and evaluate how the reform we're talking about affects the system overall. And that's what we need to do with vouchers, because vouchers are an innovation that has not been tested widely in many different political contexts. So we should begin to see what we have learned from the one important context in which it has been tried, and that's Seattle. By far. The academic who's doing the most to study this carefully is a professor at Stony Brook University, Jennifer Herwig. Jennifer was a graduate of NYU Bachelor's, Master's, and PhD. I met her when she joined the Safra center to be a postdoc between 2013 and 2014. Since 2014, she's taught at Stony Brook. But she has conducted a very careful, extensive analysis about how the voucher program which Seattle embraced has worked, what it's done what the effect has been on how people participate in the democracy of Seattle. And in this conversation, we'll talk about how vouchers have mattered and what they've done to change the way democracy in Seattle works as a way to think about how they might matter more generally or nationally. Stay tuned. Jennifer, thank you so much for talking to us about the question of vouchers, but I want to start by thinking about the question of participation in democracy more generally, if we think about how we participate in democracy. What you've emphasized in this couple chapters that I've seen is that the obvious way people participate, namely by voting, is not the only or most important way. Potentially, people also participate through activism. They rally people to come out and to vote or to come to political meetings, and they also participate through funding. And I think it's really valuable to start with material you've got about just how unequal the participation among these three are. Let's just simplify it. Two of them, voting and funding is, and how different the public seems if you look at it from the perspective of voting and of funding. So why don't you begin by helping us understand that a bit.

So, yes, campaign donors versus Voters Voting is the most common form of political participation. Lots of Americans do it. Probably not as many as we would hope, but nonetheless, it's the most common form of participation. And if you look at voters, they're not perfectly representative of the American population, but they're pretty close. They look like Americans in general. Campaign donors and campaign donations, on the other hand, are a form of participation that a very narrow slice of the population takes part in. We know that the people who do this form of participation look a lot different than the American population, and they look a lot different from American voters. This is striking because we know that campaign donations are a really important form of participation. Right? It's voting is participation, and it's important. But campaign donations have this added layer of they're not only just participation, they're a form of political influence. And we know from surveys of donors and from interview studies and just anecdotally from folks who have served in Congress that if you're somebody who is making donations all the time, you're making big donations, you have a kind of level of access and leverage that ordinary voters don't, that I don't, as a constituent who refuses to give money. And it creates all kinds of gaping kind of inequalities in the political system. And I think one of the things that I always try to emphasize to folks who don't study this is just how tiny the population of donors is. I think that folks think because small donations have become more common, that it's a huge slice of the American population. And it is true that more Americans have been making small donations. But if you look at people who are making significant donations that really matter to campaigns, it's 1% of the population, of the adult population, and in some contexts, even less than that. So it's a minority form of participation, and it's a really important one.

Yeah, so you quote the center for responsive politics in 2022, which said that in 2018, 0.47%. So that's less than 1%. Less than one half of 1% of the American population gave $200 or more to federal political committees, and that constituted 71% of total funds raised by those committees. And to emphasize your point about small dollars, you say, quote, candidates receive a paltry 10% of their funds from small donors and over 50% from larger donors giving more than $200. So this gap, as you put it, is quite pronounced. And one way I like to think about it, though, is just what does it mean to our politicians? So you could say our politicians are obviously dependent on voters, like they're not going to get to office unless they're voted in by a plurality in their district. So there's a very tight dependency to the people through voting. But they're also not going to get to office unless they raise money. They're dependent on funders. And the interaction between those two dependencies is quite perverse because obviously if you got to please the funders just to be a candidate, the funders have already filtered out a whole bunch of people who, you know, just can't be candidates because they're not going to raise the money or the big money that they need to get in. So this dual dependency is incredibly distortive because of these two ways in which people represent. And that makes really important the contribution that you're talking about. We're going to get to in a second of this different way of funding campaigns, because in principle that can reduce that gap. But that's getting ahead of the story a bit. Okay, so we have these different ways of participating. The one very important way we're going to focus on now is funding campaigns. We have a system of private funding, and that private funding, we've already, you have this nice word that donorate, meaning the people who are donating the donor it are not representative of the people. We get it. And you also talk about access so how do we know how it matters to access?

Yeah, this is one of my favorite talking points when I teach this to my undergraduates. Because now we rarely in social science have evidence that comes in many different forms and shows the same thing in terms of contributions buying access. Now we have that layered knowledge, information about how contributions by access. One way we know is, as I said, interview studies that sociologists have been doing for a long time, talking to folks who run, let's say, political action committees, talking to political candidates. And they will tell you quite frankly, like, look, I talk to my donors more often, right. And they're can be pretty frank. We also know it from surveys of political donors that donors who are more active, they give more frequently over time are more likely to say, yeah, I don't, I know my representative, I know my senator, of course. Why do you think I'm giving money then? The final way that we know about this relationship, and this is kind of the gold standard in social science today, is through a randomized experiment of representatives. These two very enterprising researchers sent out, I believe it was email solicitations asking members of Congress like, hey, can I talk to you about. It was a very particular issue. In one solicitation they were framed as donors and another, they were framed as constituents. And what do you know, in the donor condition we get much higher rates of access to chiefs of staff, the actual representative and just staff in the representative's office down the line. So there are lots of different kind of pieces of evidence now that have accumulated and I think we're kind of agreed at this point that if nothing else, money is generating access.

Yeah, much more, you say, actually five times more likely to offer a meeting with senior staff than to a non donating constituent. Which obviously is the game then, especially if you're in a business, an industry that requires ongoing relationships with the government. You gotta buy it, you gotta buy access. And once again, that emphasizes the deep inequality in the way in which the system actually manifests representativeness inside of the system. Now we have in our private funding system a number of different ways in which candidates raise money. So what are the big ones that you think are most significant here?

It changes by the day, but at the moment, for a long time it's been individual donations. Individual donors are really the heart of the money that candidates themselves are getting for their campaigns. And in particular, even though we hear lots and lots about small donors, which again are important and have become more important, it's really these donors who are giving larger amounts of money over $200, which we call itemized contributions. They are like the lifeblood of the federal system. Candidates get much more money from these, like, significant donors who are making larger donations than they do from small donors. There are outlier candidates like aoc, Right. Who gets all of her money from small donors, but they are really the minority. And if you look at kind of the distribution of where the money is coming from, it's these larger donors. So individual donors who are giving big amounts are really the heart of the system. And then we also have political action committees who represent corporate interests, labor unions, other kind of ideological interest groups. And they have actually become less important over time. And individuals have become more important in the federal system, which is kind of an interesting thing that individuals like you and me are becoming more and more central to how campaigns are financing their elections. So it's individuals, it's people like you and me. Not like me because I don't give money, but other people, less ethical people.

Okay, we're not going to get too judgmental here.

Okay, sorry.

But, but so. And what's significant about the difference between them is that there's been a lot of work trying to measure the kind of influence the different types of donations represent. And one interesting counterintuitive fact is that the PAC donations, mainly from corporations, but as you say, labor unions also do package donations, are the more centrist or the more moderate influence in the political system. Small donors. There's a lot of growth in extreme small donors. These are people more typically engaged. It's hard to measure, I think, large donors directly. I don't really know much work about that. But all of these are people who are giving money to a candidate directly. That's not necessarily the most important in many races, political money that there is. Right. So in addition to that, what are the other big players in, like, campaign money?

Yeah, well, post Citizens United, it's now super PACs. There was a kind of a murky period in the early 2000s where there were other kind of dark money nonprofit groups that were playing a role. Now it's really these independent expenditure only committees that have come on the scene. And essentially these are political committees that can accept unlimited contributions, not only from individuals, which there are a lot of billionaires running around who like to do this, but also from corporations. And that was kind of the crux of the Citizens United decision, was giving corporations the right to also make these kinds of independent expenditures. So now if you look at competitive races and national elections, no surprise you see a lot of super PAC activity There they are financed by very, very large donations. We're talking millions and millions of dollars that are coming from, let's say, single individuals or from single corporate entities, although a lot less so than individuals. And in some cases, they actually swamp the spending of the candidate campaign itself, which is kind of fascinating. That asterisk there is that super PACs are at least nominally uncoordinated campaigns. So they're not supposed to coordinate their activity with candidate campaigns. We know that that's not actually how it plays out. But letter of the law is that they are uncoordinated. They are doing these things independent of a candidate's actual campaign.

Yeah, the things that they're doing that have to be independent is the expenditures. They're not allowed to coordinate their messaging, but in fact, they do lots of coordinate. Yeah, they can do lots of coordinating of fundraising. They can do. They can have the candidate show up at a fundraising event where they raise millions of dollars, unlimited contributions. So the line is very murky. But there's a kind of important qualification that people listening to this series will kind of be heard me focus on obsessively between Citizens United States and a case by the D.C. circuit a couple months afterwards called SpeechNow. Because all citizens United says is, yes, if you're spending independently, you can spend unlimited amounts of money. Corporations, unions, adding on to what Buckley had said in 1976, individuals. Then it made sense that political action committees that were independent could also spend unlimited amounts of money. But that left open the question, how do they raise their money? And what speech now said is that if spending independently is not constitutionally regulable, it follows as a matter of logic that fundraising to independent political action committees also cannot trigger quid pro quo corruption and therefore also cannot be regulated. That step is a logical mistake. And it's astonishing 13 years after, we still have not corrected that logical mistake. But that's the thing that created Super PACS. Because it was SpeechNow that then led the FEC to say, okay, here's a simple way to have these really monster committees, okay, so we have a private system. It creates all sorts of unrepresentative representative democracy. And obviously then for 50 years at least, we've seen major innovations at the federal level and at the state level to try to build alternatives to the system. The very first federal major innovation in funding was the law in the early 70s that gave us presidential public funding. It didn't include correct congressional public funding, although it came very close. And that was upheld as public funding by the Supreme Court in Buckley Vallejo. But you have a really wonderful arc and explanation of the evolution of these alternative forms that leads to the one that I hope we're going to spend most of our time talking about. But walk us through how these alternatives developed and some faded and others have come in in their place.

Yeah, well, certainly you are right in pointing to the Fika in the 1970s creating the presidential system. But then post 1970s, where we see the most movement in terms of population, public campaign financing is actually at the state level. And at the state level there's been an interesting evolution from, I would say, the popularity of the grants based systems coming first in the kind of order of succession.

Like the presidential system.

Like the presidential, exactly. Well, there's a matching component there too, but it was kind of hybrid. Then the matching systems coming into place and now potentially voucher systems catching on. Chronologically, the grants based systems, states like Connecticut and Maine are clean election states. And essentially what those systems do is they have either partial or full funding for candidates and state elections. After a candidate qualifies, the state gives that candidate a lump sum of money to run their campaign. Right. So it could be, you know, half of what their expenses will be or whatever the full anticipated spending cap will be. And those are grants based systems. Baked into a grants based system, however, is a complete kind of divorce of public campaign financing from any form of participation or interaction with constituents. Right. You qualify, let's say, you collect signatures, small dollar donations, and then you get public money and essentially you're off the hook. Matching systems do incentivize participation of voters and of course, of candidates soliciting those contributions. Matching systems, probably the most well known one is the one in New York City where I live, where candidates for our city offices can participate in a matching system. And the way that works is you get a private contribution up to a certain limit and then it is multiplied by public money. So there's some kind of matching multiplier in a matching system that supplements a private contribution with public money. So in essence, it's magnifying the impact of these smaller donations. That's the kind of system that New York City has. They were very popular for a long time. Actually they've been passed and some other municipalities around the country more recently, like Montgomery County. Third type of public campaign finance system that I've probably spent the most time studying now is this voucher system system of, you could call it vouchers or democracy dollars. And that system is really interesting because it takes out the private contribution component of the matching system and puts publicly funded vouchers, or democracy dollars in the hands of voters that they can then allocate to candidates that are running in whatever race is eligible for that form of funding. So it's a novel form of public campaign financing. It's one that I know you know a lot about as one of the people who thought, who thought up the kind of architecture of these kinds of programs.

Okay, but let's. We're going to talk about that right now, but let's just make sure we understand the relationship between what vouchers might be and at least matching funds. I think your point about clean elections is exactly right. It doesn't require any participation. The other big vulnerability to clean elections has is that it depends upon ongoing desire of the legislature to fund it at the level necessary. So, Connecticut, I've spoken to legislators, I went and spoke to a bunch of Democratic legislators there, and they love the system because it basically means at a certain point they stop fundraising. And nobody really likes to be fundraising. Yeah, but the problem is that they don't fund enough, so they increasingly depend on outside funding, or people have to opt out of the system just to be able to be competitive. So if you think, is it likely the legislature is going to fund funding for elections over schools or over roads? The answer is no. So it's strategically probably not the wisest move to make sure that we continue to have relative independence. The interesting question about matching funds is how close it gets to our idea of representativeness. So Malbin has done most of the work here to try to convince us that there are great systems and they actually do work. And you quote him, him and Parrot saying that New York City's model almost perfectly reflects the city's diversity as a whole. Although you say the author stopped short of describing the characteristics of individual donors participating in the program, I wonder, when you look at that system with the perspective that you've developed in the context of your understanding of vouchers, what are the weakest parts of what would be the arguments you would advance against the idea of matching over something else?

I mean, I think that the obvious one is even to make a matchable contribution, you have to have some extra money lying around. Right? And for a lot of people, that's doable, but for a whole lot of Americans, it's not. So even under a matching system, you're going to leave out a portion of the population that typically has less political voice. Anyhow, the matching system in New York City, Melbourne's work is great. We actually haven't Gotten the kind of individual level analysis of how donors and matching programs compare to donors and voucher systems. Isis expect that even though we have good geographic representation in matching systems, we're not going to have the same kind of explosion and participation by people who are traditionally kind of priced out of private funding that we have with vouchers. So the matching system sort of bakes in some inequality automatically because you have to have the money to participate in the matching program to actually be a player. The other thing I would say here, and one thing that I've been thinking more about is a matching system can accommodate a candidate who already has an established donor network. It doesn't necessarily force candidates to go out and make new contacts and talk to their constituents and bring in actually new people into the local political system. And a matching system, you can, you can still go through your Rolodex and people don't have those anymore, but you can still go through your iPhone and say, like this person I work with 10 years ago, I wonder if they'll give me a contribution. In other words, it doesn't disrupt the networks that we know that candidates have with donors in a way that a voucher system might, because you can rely on the same kinds of people, actually the same people in a matching system, and instead of them giving you two $250 and it being worth $250 now, it's multiplied and worth thousands of dollars. Right. So I think that it just, it doesn't necessarily have the same impact at disrupting the kinds of people in terms of demographics, but also the kinds of people in terms of the repeat, the frequent donors who are giving over and over in these elections and already have access and already know the people who are running for office and running the show. Right.

And one flaw we see in the current system of representation or the candidates who get to be representatives, is that it's the kind of people who are plugged into these networks of power that are more likely to be able to raise money. So you know, a lot of white men, lawyers, are in a great place to raise tons of money because they've had tons of clients and they can call all of them and they're all going to give a bunch of money. But you know, if you've been a schoolteacher or you know, you've not been, you've been a stay at home mom or something like that, and now think it's time for you, it's time for you to get in, you just don't have the starting resource that's not tangible money that you've earned, but connections that are. It's worth money. So it doesn't solve that problem either. And we should flag, although I'll just note, I don't know what the answer to this is, we should also flag that there's one concern about voucher, about matching fund systems as a version of small dollar funding systems, that it might exacerbate polarization. Now, some of the people I respect most in this field, including Malvern, say that's not true, that there's no good evidence of that. So we don't know whether it's true or not. But it's one thing to consider. Who are we incentivizing to be included in the system? And if we know, because we do know this, that the most extreme people in our political system are actually also the most engaged, they're kind of low hanging fruit for raising money in this. And if we don't have a good way to get a bunch of other people into the system, it's conceivable it creates that kind of distorting effect. Okay, which brings us to vouchers. All right. Now I have also spoken here to Alan Durning, who's obviously pretty critical in this story. I'm not quite sure yet whether he, he's going to go before you or after you in this series of conversations. So I'm not going to make too much depend upon it. But obviously he was at the core of the policy innovation process that got Seattle vouchers. So I don't want to spend too much time talking about that here. But I do want to rely on you who's independent of the process. So you've been observing it from the outside, not as somebody who built it to just help us understand the elements and what we now know about what that system has done. So let's just start with the basic structure and demographics of what the problem, what vouchers in Seattle are trying to do.

Yeah. So like a democracy dollar system, the voucher system in Seattle took this idea of putting public monies for local elections so city elections in the hands of voters. And the way that it works in Seattle is every registered slash active voter in Seattle receives these four $25 democracy vouchers at the beginning of a local election cycle. So Seattle's actually having a local election for districted city council seats now in 2023. So every all registered voters in Seattle got their packet of four $25 vouchers. The hope of the program is that by giving people this money that they can use to support local candidates running for city council, city attorney and mayor. Now that the program will increase participation and campaign funding, number one. Number two, that in increasing participation, we're not just increasing participation among the same kinds of people that we know make private contributions, but among folks who typically are, I use the term in the book, priced out of making a campaign contribution. So these are folks who are lower income, people of color. The racial disparities and campaign contributions are like mind blowing. Lower income and younger folks, right? Primarily. And so the hope was not only that we're going to increase participation, we're going to increase participation among people who typically don't have a voice in this form of participation. And then as kind of a ancillary benefit or effect of the program, these public money should allow people without this long list of contacts from being a white lawyer to run for office, for local office. So it's going to make the candidate pool wider, it's going to make the candidate pool more diverse and at the same time it's also going to widen the field of people who are financing elections. And down the line they're only, I guess this is the fourth cycle that they're using the program down the line. This, if our theories are correct as social scientists, this should translate into better policy outcomes. In other words, that people have more voice, average voters are getting more voice. We should get better policy for all kinds of folks in Seattle.

So one thing that I hadn't known until, I hadn't thought about to think about this as a problem before I read what you've sent me is the real cost of getting votes in these local elections you described. City council member represents 100,000 people, which is pretty big. I mean, that's a lot of people. I mean a congressperson only represents 750,000 or something. So it's a lot of people. But the level of participation in elections is extremely low. So the actual cost per vote for these local races is much, much higher than the cost per vote for a U.S. house race or U.S. senate race. Which makes the funding problem even more perverse because now you're even more dependent on if in a privately funded system on outside money, money from interested people to be elected, because you just know how expensive it is to make the system work. So we've had three cycles, we're in the fourth. Right now you're writing maps, three conclusions that I think it's really useful to put on the table and I'm going to quote them right now because I think you state Them very clearly. And then there are a couple others that I thought I knew was true, but this part of your book that I've seen doesn't talk about. So the first one you say is, we find within the three election cycles, the Democracy Voucher program transformed participation in the funding of local elections compared to donor participation in the elections prior to the implementation of the program, More Seattle residents are engaging in the campaign finance system, and Seattle now has one of the highest contributor rates in local elections across the nation. This new broader base of financial support has simultaneously enabled a much wider field of candidates in local races too. So that's point number one. Point number two, another point that I just hadn't thought about, but I think it's really interesting. Second, we explore the ways in which the program has renewed the pool of participants in local elections. So renewed in the sense of you see new people entering into the process of funding that hadn't been funding before. Then. The third point that you emphasized here that third, by providing public monies to average voters, the program has also significantly increased the representation of people of color, younger and less affluent voters, broadening the base of support for local candidates. Perhaps as a consequence, the local representatives are now, on average, significantly younger, include more women and a higher proportion of people of color. Then altogether, you say when participation is more equitable across groups, the evidence suggests that cities are more likely to have governing bodies that look like them and to implement policies that reflect the preferences and needs of those diverse constituencies. And so all three of these, in some sense would have been imaginable at the time that the program was adopted. But which of these do you think surprised people the most? Or that they hadn't really extra benefits to the system that they hadn't thought about before?

That's interesting. So I'll answer it in two ways. When you talk to just like average folks about the program, the single fact that people really kind of glom onto in a way that I always find surprising is just the explosion in participation because people a don't recognize how low participation in this form of elections is to begin with. And then to say, and now Seattle's almost at 10%. People go like, oh, you know, like a light bulb goes off that there's. That this inequity is so baked into our system and it's kind of invisible. So average folks, I think, really react to the explosion and participation that we've seen in Seattle, inside Seattle. I think they. So of course, the people who run the program were hoping that the participants would be more Representative I think the thing that will be most surprising to people who are actually in the mix is this element of renewal, right? I think it's a good thing because we know that people who give campaign contributions tend to do so kind of repeatedly over time, and that has certain implications. It could also look at half glass, half full, half empty. The kind of downside of this is that every election cycle, what we're seeing in Seattle is that the people who are using vouchers are new, right? So people give their vouchers in one cycle, and then perhaps they don't participate again. Now, of course, we're only four cycles in, so this will change as the program matures. But essentially there's a lot of kind of movement and fluidity in who's participating in elections. Voucher users are not the same people. Each and every cycle, we're bringing in new people into the system every time the voucher program is used. And the cash donors who were giving money before the program started are, you know, some of them are still giving, and some of them are using vouchers instead of their own money. But they're. They're a tiny percentage of. Of the people who are funding elections now. So this is really like, these are new folks. These are not the same people who are financing elections before the program. I think, you know, that from a candidate perspective, is really interesting. That means that candidates are going out there, and I don't know if they're talking to them at length, but they're having some sort of an interaction or some kind of a relationship with their constituents, types of constituents that they didn't have before. I think that's a really interesting thing that's come out of this work, especially because you could imagine it going a different way. Right. When I looked at the numbers, I was actually surprised that there was, at this point, little persistence in voucher usage. Over time, I would have kind of expected that people just keep, you know, keep doing what they're doing, but it's so far not the case.

And do we have anybody who's trying to understand why people will use them in one year and not use them in another year? Have there been efforts to follow up and survey?

I mean, I don't think so. I think at this point it would have to be me. I would have to go out there and talk. I would have to go out there and ask people. My sense is that there'll probably be a cyclical pattern that will emerge after we see the program go through several more cycles where the same kinds of people. People or same people are being brought in by, let's say, mayoral elections. People may be more inclined to be involved in the district elections. And at the end of the day, this is a young program, so it's hard to say what this is going to look like, hopefully if it's reauthorized in 10 or 15 years. My sense is that because there's so much churn not only in whose financing elections, but we have so many more candidates now that people are being brought in because they're really, they're really psyched about one particular person who's running in their district, or they're really excited about this one mayoral candidate. And then the next cycle there's just not someone who kind of piques their interest in the same way. So hopefully we'll get a better sense of that as the program matures.

Does the program give or make available the list of who's used vouchers in the past to candidates or to political parties?

Yeah, I mean we can track them over and in fact, this is something that I'm going to add to the chapter that's not in the version you saw, which essentially shows that the plurality of voucher users have only participated in one cycle. So less persistence in voucher usage than I may have anticipated going into it. Right. We don't see like a very large portion of voucher users that gave in all three cycles continuously.

Right. But I mean, so does the Democratic Party have access to a list of who used vouchers?

Yeah, it's all publicly available.

And so they have a way to reach out to them and say you funded last time, make sure you fund again. But they haven't done that.

I mean, actually that's one of the things that I'm writing about right now is the use of data and campaigning and how that sometimes can kind of subvert the intent of the program because candidates have a list of people that are likely to participate, likely to vote, likely to give a voucher. And if you're only targeting those people, that kind of replicates the dynamics of a hard money system. So I assume that they are doing that why we're not seeing more persistence yet again, I think has to with do do with the kinds of. Right. So the first round of the program was featured these two at large city council seats and the city attorney mayor was not included in the first cycle. And then 2019 was districted elections, which I don't know. I think people are probably not as broadly excited about districted elections as the city races. So it may just have to do with, like, the kinds of offices that were up.

Another thing you note, and I hadn't recognized this at all, is that the city actually sets a budget amount for the amount of money they will give, which is a cap to the number of vouchers that could be used. So, in principle, you could, like, attract many more vouchers than you could get money because it goes above the budget. How often have they gotten close or have they ever had to block the amount of money they were going to give because they exceeded the budget amount?

They have? Actually, this is another thing I'm writing about currently in the final chapter of the book, which talks about the practical and legal challenges of the program. And one of the central challenges of any public campaign finance program is balancing costs. Right. And in Seattle, they made this design choice that, unlike the kind of programs that you and others had envisioned, where voters get vouchers, and then essentially as many vouchers as you can collect is the amount of money you can raise for your campaign, in Seattle, there's a hard spending cap. Once you qualify for the program, you accept these spending limits for an option office. Right. So after that spending cap, even if somebody allocates their voucher to you, you don't get to redeem that money in 2017. I was just writing this, so I have it fresh in my head about. It was like, almost 30% of the vouchers that were used in that cycle were. Were allocated to candidates that had already maxed out and therefore were never redeemed. So it's a. It's a. At least in 2017, it was a significant portion of the kind of participation, and it raises questions about whether or not that can be kind of demotivating for folks, whether the spending cap should be higher, whether there should be spending caps at all. All kinds of practical challenges and questions around how these spending caps relate to voter participation in the program.

Okay. But I'm now seeing there's actually two separate questions of caps that I hadn't. Hadn't distinguished in the question. So candidates have a spending cap. They agree they're only going to spend a certain amount of money, and so it doesn't make sense to raise money beyond that. But the city also has a certain amount of money that they.

Oh, I see. Yes.

Yeah. So have they ever, like, has there ever been more vouchers than the city has decided to spend?

No, that has not happened yet. They have not run out of money.

Yeah. Okay.

Which is good. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. So that's Actually a less troubling problem because maybe you just want to reduce spending. Maybe like one of the problems you see in politics is too much spending. It's not my problem, but I understand how people could see that. Okay. The other thing that's really interesting is whether there's information about how the. The practice of collecting vouchers has changed. One challenge to that is that, as you've described, it's been different offices in the three cycles. So we don't have consistent pattern. But one would expect that candidates would get to be good at thinking about the kinds of activities that are likely to have people turn out and give them vouchers. So block parties or dances, I don't know all these things you described that they can do. Is there evidence that, that each cycle we have experts who come in and say, I have a strategy to collect the most vouchers and here's what it would be.

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to do the systematic candidate survey that I would like to do to answer that question. I have interviewed a good number of candidates at this point, and I can tell you that the strategies are quite varied. There is a lot of what you would anticipate and what you would hope from the program, like, I'm going to throw a block party, I'm going to have a barbecue at my house, and you can come and give me your vouchers. There's social media solicitations that folks use, and then there's also a good deal of what we call data driven campaigning where candidates are using some kind of voter list voter file to target voters, voucher users who are likely to be kind of ideologically sympathetic to them and actually give them their vouchers. So it's a mix. I don't know the precise percentages. I know that there's lots of anecdotal evidence from people in Seattle who say, like, yeah, I had candidates knocking on my door and I've never seen a city council candidate before in my life. So that's kind of like heartwarming. I don't know, unfortunately, how widespread it is, but it does seem like from the candidates that I've talked to, they are using kind of boots on the ground strategies, going door to door, talking to people trying to collect the vouchers. Even if they don't give the vouchers in that particular interaction, they send the vouchers later on, community events, they. These kinds of things. So it's a bit of a mixed bag. I think it's an area that we should probably know more about than we do at the moment, but.

Yeah, but from a theoretical standpoint, these are all activities that we would think of as pro democratic activities. I mean, the alternative is that people are sitting in a cubicle calling rich people and asking for thousand dollar contributions. Now if they're out there door to door in block parties with everybody in their district equally like a poor area of their district is just as valuable as a rich area of the district, maybe more, because the likelihood they're going to come across somebody willing to give up their vouchers could be higher. So it's pro democratic in this representative sense. And so independent of the funding mechanism, this is an important outcome. You introduce an interesting idea in the paper in chapter three about the vouchers called the representation ratio. You define that as the degree to which each group is over or underrepresented in a particular form of participation. And the three forms that you're talking about are the democracy voucher voting and cash, or the old system of just giving money. And what's significant is the democracy voucher representative representation ratio is higher than the voting ratio in many of these contexts and significantly so. So that this is in some sense a better representation of the public. One way to think about this than even the voting. Was that surprising to you or is this something that seemed like an obvious consequence?

It didn't seem like an obvious consequence, in fact. So you're exactly right. And in particular, 2021, we saw this somewhat strange thing happen where democracy voucher users actually had higher shares of, let's say younger folks, higher shares of lower income folks than even people voting in the election that cycle. And I did find it surprising. And I think my hypothesis here is that what's going on is that folks are perhaps using their vouchers in the primary because they're really excited about a candidate. They may be gotten contacted by them, they've had some kind of interaction perhaps, and they use their vouchers. That candidate doesn't advance to the general and they decide not to vote. Could go something like that. But I think that it was surprising because it suggests that there's some element of the voucher program program that is getting people more excited or engaged than whatever is happening in the general election. And I think that has to be the kinds of candidates that are available to them in the primary.

Seattle, I should know this. Does Seattle have a mail in voting or is that. That's Oregon, not. Not Washington.

Yeah, no, Washington does. Yes.

Okay, so. So everybody votes by mail.

They do.

Okay, so One reason there could have been a difference, but it doesn't sound like this would be a reason, is that it might be hard to participate on a particular day, but easier to participate over months, which is what the democracy voucher would give you a chance for. But I guess if you can vote for a month, then that's not going to be a good distinction between them. It is interesting. It was surprising to me it had this kind of effect as I read this. And I thought, like, what's the most likely part of the story to excite opposition? This isn't a reason I would oppose democracy vouchers or I think any pro democratic, pro small d democratic person would oppose democracy vouchers, but the people in power might oppose it. There's a pretty dramatic effect on incumbency, right? You saw a lot of turnover in candidates and incumbency. I mean, you at some points are very clear about the consequence flowing from the use of vouchers. Like the increase in participation is because of the vouchers. How confident are you about the consequence for incumbents? Is that because of the vouchers or is that just because, I mean, you know, indirectly? We got lots more competition, lots more people that are appealing to different kinds of constituents in their districts. Maybe they just don't want to compete like that. But how would you think about this more generally? Is this just going to be a consequence which might be a reason why term limits people would like this too.

So I'm pretty confident that this incumbency effect or like the decreased incumbency advantage that we're seeing in Seattle is a result of the program. And the reason I'm convinced of that linkage is because the study that I cite for that program particular statistic is one in which a couple of economists compare Seattle to a bunch of cities in Washington and to California. And by comparing them, comparing Seattle to these different cities over the same time period, they're able to kind of suss out whether or not it was the program or something else that was going on across all of these places. And so it's really Seattle as an outlier. Here we have the rate at which incumbents decide to run for office decrease much faster than other places. I mean, I have the statistics in the paper and texture right in front of me. It goes from 78% of incumbents deciding to run in Seattle to 44% on average. Yeah, it's huge. It's 30 percentage points. You never get effects that big. Will this play out if this program becomes portable, that in essence it Becomes, you know, some people have framed public campaign financing as like an incumbent protection program. And the voucher program seems to really not be that. I think it might. I think it's likely to because it enables all kinds of people to run for local office. And there are many. There are just many more candidates now and many more quality challengers who are making it into the general election and giving incumbents a run for their money, literally. So, yeah, I think it's a good thing overall. There's more competition, we're bringing in more people as candidates. But the powers that be, when we're talking about like this program potentially making its way to other municipalities are going to see this and think, you know, well, I don't want a public campaign finance system that's going to make it harder for me to win re election. I want the matching program or something like that.

Do we see similar effects with matching? Is there any evidence? Is there any comparison there?

I know folks are working on it. We don't have direct comparisons now. My guess is that we're not going to see the same kind of maybe not affects the sizes like we do with the voucher program. And because of this network effect that we've already talked about with the voucher program.

And then one final bit, just reporting on what's happened, it's been a pretty significant effect in the actual candidates who win, or at least the actual candidates who win are significantly different from what they were before the voucher system, whether it's because of the voucher system or not. And the two categories that are pretty significant. You say the program is associated with large increases of the percentage of people of color and women among winning candidates in Seattle and substantial decrease in the age of the average winning candidate. So we're getting younger, more diverse candidates, or as we said at the very top, a picture that's more accurately representative of the actual public than was produced in the older system. Again, very pro democratic. Okay, I want to talk just at the end here a little bit about some questions and where we're going from here in Seattle. Do we see a growing organized opposition? I mean, I know there was a constitutional opposition which I was part of the litigation to try to defend the voucher system organized by right wing libertarian think tank. But beyond that, do you see politicians beginning to say let's abolish the voucher system because it's welfare for politicians or something like that?

So not yet. They have. They're in the midst of their districted city council elections which could end up really changing the composition of the city council, depending on how things go. Seattle is in the midst of varied crises that are common to major cities across the US Right now. So housing affordability and homelessness and the drug crisis. The city council candidates this election cycle are very focused on these issues. That's important because I think that what we know from other public campaign finance systems is that when times are tough, when budgets are tight, the thing that looks the most kind of superfluous is the public campaign finance system. Why do we need to fund democracy? Let's fund schools. Why do we need to fund elections? We need to fund roads or whatever. So it becomes kind of a surplus budget item. And I think with the kind of tenor of the debates that are going on in Seattle right now, we might end up having a council that's less pro democracy vouchers, although they're almost all using the program so the candidates to cycle. But it will be interesting to see how that plays out because Seattle does have a number of issues, big citywide issues that they have to deal with. Outside of that, I have not seen or heard of any organized opposition. The organized opposition that had. Well, okay, I'll take it back. The Chamber of Commerce in Seattle has been doing some polling and they haven't been active in the. They were not as active in the 2021 election. It will be interesting to see if they decide to take a stance when the program comes up for reauthorization in the next year or two. I haven't heard of anything very organized organized, but it's possible that they have something in the works.

Yeah, it's hard to see what the campaign message would be because all the things they would be defending and all the things they would be attacking would seem to be consonant with democracy. But anyway, that'll be interesting to see if it happens. One question that these chapters didn't address, but which you teased me with in this sense of making me extremely excited about, was the idea that we saw evidence that people who used vouchers actually voted more. The turnout was higher. Is that something that the data bears out?

So this is like the million dollar question and everybody wants to know the answer. And essentially from a methodological standpoint, it's basically impossible to answer without some buy in from some. We need some randomization, essentially. And it's hard to get that when program administrators are committed to equity. That said, my co author and I have run many regressions looking at the relationship between voucher usage and voting. And in a model where you have voucher usage as A predictor of voting in the general. Voucher usage is a very significant predictor of voting above and beyond all of the other things we know will predict voting, like race, class, gender, blah, blah, blah. So there's good descriptive evidence that yes, voucher usage kind of also increases voting. Having a really kind of cohesive causal story about that is going to be hard to pull together. But I think there might be a relationship there.

Hard to pull together just because you would have to intervene in an actual election process to make it sufficiently robust from a method perspective.

Right. So, I mean, what we would really want to do ideally. And we tried to convince the people in Seattle to let us do this and they laughed at us. We were like, can we please randomize vouchers? And a small subset of the city doesn't have to be the whole city so that we have some variation. Some people got the vouchers and some people didn't. Then we can compare them. On average, they should be the same. And the program and administrators were like, we're shocked you would even ask us that, Jen, because you know that we're committed to equity. But we had to ask, um, the other way you could do it is if you could find some, let's say, random way to increase voucher usage among. So you could somehow randomly incentivize voucher usage and actually get some effect there, then you could identify the effect of voucher usage on voting. But that would require like a big field, randomized field experiment that so far nobody's given me money for. Again, got to go back and do the interviews and the experiment, but thus far we haven't. We don't have that kind of infrastructure to do something like that.

Okay, so vouchers happened in Seattle. Oakland just voted for vouchers. Louisiana is considering it. Where do you think it's going to happen next?

I mean, I'm optimistic about LA actually making a move. I will say. I don't know if you've been following Oakland, but this kind of public campaign financing is a political football thing happened there. The mayor kind of gutted the program in the budget. So it's now kind of on hold because the mayor's budget just didn't have any funding for the. The program. So it's not going to be rolled out in 2024 as anticipated, unfortunately. So we'll have to see if they come up with the, the money for that in the future. I will say broadly, I don't know of any other places considering it right now outside of Oak. I mean, Mun municipalities outside of Oakland, Louisiana and San Diego County. But I think that for better or worse, the most momentum for the program is at the local level. So city and county governments are the ones that are kind of really seriously considering this. I haven't heard recently of any organized efforts at like a statewide program or, you know, the national, national program seems to be off the table for the moment.

Right. Although John Sarbanes, who has been the architect of so much reform for the People act, which included matching funds. But I was excited to see that he also included a pilot program for vouchers in that system. If you, you know, were talking to John Sarbanes, I could channel, you know, Jen to Sarbanes, Jen to John. What would you say to him about what that voucher program pilot should look like and whether you should just dump the matching fund and go full force for the vouchers?

I mean, those are two separate, very different questions. I think. I'm currently of the opinion that any form of public campaign financing program is better than none. And so I would take matching relative to nothing. I do think vouchers are probably going to turn out to have better kind of pro democratic outcomes than the matching systems. That's my hunch. What would I tell Sarbanes? I would say, you know, we can start small and demonstrate the efficacy of this program if, you know, a couple of things have to happen. First of all, the voucher pilot has to be funded at a level that makes it realistic for candidates to buy into it. So if, you know, if they were going to do it, if they wanted to do it in particular state context, that would be a great way to kind of demonstrate the efficacy of the program. We would need to know, like, how much do races for House on average cost in the state, so let's don't pick Alaska and then try to get something up and running. And I think that would be kind of a compelling demonstration of what the program can do because Seattle is, at the end of the day, it's not very diverse and it hasn't been tried in a place that is really, truly very kind of racially, economically diverse. And I think that it could potentially be a game changer, game changer for participation in a place where it has the power to grow in that way.

Do you have a sense of how big it would have to be to be meaningful,

how big it would have to be? I mean, I think that even if we had a couple of states buy into it or a couple of districts buy into it, and there were districts that let's say are really they look like America. Right. We have a couple in Texas, we have a couple in California, we have a couple in New York. There we can really show the potential of the program because Seattle is majority white city still. And so even though it's bringing in more people of color, there's kind of a limit to how much they can do in terms of growing the diversity of the donor pool there. If we look at a place like New New York or San Francisco, there might be more opportunities to bring in folks who are really just traditionally kind of excluded from that system. Seattle's also a pretty wealthy city on average compared to other places. So I think a couple of districts would give us enough data points to at least say, like, okay, this is what donors look like before, this is what they look like after. This is how much participation increased and this is how much it cost. Right. And if you are a pro Democratic elected official, I think that should be compelling. You know, it's not always not compelling for everyone anymore.

Yeah, that would be a wonderful experiment to see launched. Jennifer, thank you so much for talking to us and especially thank you for your work. I feel like, you know, a deadbeat dad who, like, planted a seed of this idea many, many years ago, and then it just gone on, and then I get to come back and see a whole forest has grown. And this is really wonderful. It's really fantastic that you've helped people understand the strengths and some of the weaknesses that might help guide reform. So thank you.

Thank you for having me. This has been really.

This has been the fifth episode of the fifth season of the podcast Another Way. These podcasts, produced by Equal Citizens, are made by Josh Elstrow of Elstrow Productions. You can find more about Equal Citizens at equalcitizens. Us. Give us your thoughts, your feedback, and if you must, give us your money.

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