Evaluating Seattle's Democracy Vouchers

In 2015, voters in Seattle, Washington passed I-122, an initiative to create a taxpayer-funded “democracy vouchers” program to finance municipal elections.  Concerned about the growing influence of money in politics, proponents of I-122 argued that a public campaign finance system would return control of local politics to the residents of Seattle. Jen Heerwig (Stony Brook University) and I published two policy reports - one from the 2017 election and a second from the 2019 elections - documenting the way Seattle residents used their vouchers.

We have several papers on the impact of the voucher program on patterns of inequality in municipal finance.  In a recent article in the Urban Affairs Review, we ask who fund municipal elections. Drawing on administrative records from the Washington State Public Disclosure Commission, we examine the distribution of campaign contributions in the 2013 municipal election – the last citywide election before voters passed the voucher initiative.  We ask whether candidates build fundraising coalitions comprised primarily of small-dollar donors or whether they rely heavily on high-dollar donors to fund their campaigns, and whether campaign contributors are concentrated in specific Seattle neighborhoods. In a paper in the Election Law Journal, we show that Democracy Voucher program successfully moved the donor pool in a more egalitarian direction, although it remains demographically unrepresentative of the electorate.

With funding from the Piper Fund, we are expanding this research beyond Seattle to look at the impact of matching programs on local elections in cities like Washington, DC and New York City.