MONEY AND STATE POLITICS: STATE LEGISLATURE PARTISAN DYNAMICS AND IDEOLOGY OUTCOMES FOLLOWING CITIZENS UNITED V. FEC

Authors

• Jillian E. Pastore, Bates CollegeFollow

Abstract

What effect has Citizens United v. FEC had on state-level partisanship and the policy outcomes that follow from it? Scholarship on the influence of corporate and union spending in political campaigns has largely centered on federal elections. In this paper, I extend the analysis to the state level, leveraging the fact that Citizens United created a natural experiment across the states. Prior to the Supreme Court ruling, roughly half of the states prohibited corporate and union independent expenditures in state elections (including for governor, state senate, state house, and state supreme court races). The Citizens United decision effectively nullified these state-level bans. To assess the impact of this ban removal, I employ a difference-in-differences design comparing changes in state house partisan composition in states where bans were lifted to changes in states that had never imposed such bans. I find that states with lifted bans experienced a larger increase in the Republican share of their state house seats relative to states without preexisting bans. Building on this result, I then use a difference-in-differences framework to evaluate whether shifts in partisan control translated into changes in policy ideology. The policies examined are those plausibly aligned with corporate interests. Relative to states that never had a ban, states with lifted bans experienced a greater increase in the likelihood of adopting a Right to Work law and legalizing medical marijuana. I find no significant change in the variance of tobacco taxes. Lastly, I observe a larger decline in standardized measures of overall liberal policy ideologies in lifted-ban states. Together, these results suggest that deregulating corporate and union independent expenditures at the state level can meaningfully influence partisan outcomes and, in turn, shift states’ policy orientations in directions consistent with corporate-associated interests.

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Recommended Citation

Pastore, Jillian E. (2026) "MONEY AND STATE POLITICS: STATE LEGISLATURE PARTISAN DYNAMICS AND IDEOLOGY OUTCOMES FOLLOWING CITIZENS UNITED V. FEC," Bates College Journal of Political Studies: Vol. 3: Iss. 1, Article 11.
Available at: https://scarab.bates.edu/bjps/vol3/iss1/11