Over at the New York Times, Binyamin Appelbaum is the latest columnist to downplay the role of money in politics. His new column, “Who Wants to Buy a Politician?” has the same basic conclusion as David Brooks’s October column “Money Matters Less”: Money in politics isn’t buying much of anything. But this conclusion isn’t warranted. We do still need to worry about money in politics. Here’s what Appelbaum gets wrong, and why it matters.
Part of Appelbaum’s argument rests on the idea that money doesn’t decide elections. As does Brooks, he cites a 1994 article by economist Steven Levitt, which found a modest effect of money by studying House elections between 1972 and 1990. Levitt estimated that spending an extra $100,000 in a House race increased a candidate’s vote total by 0.33 percentage points, though this finding was not statistically significant.
But Levitt’s study is also something of an outlier. The political scientist Alan Gerber, in a 2004 article titled “Does Campaign Spending Work?: Field Experiments Provide Evidence and Suggest New Theory,” provides the following table, extrapolating the cost of each additional vote from several major studies prior to 2004.