This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, January 1st, 2021.

I'm Caleb Brown and happy New Year.

How has campaign finance changed since the famous or infamous Citizens United decision that freed up some spending in elections,

and how do voter attitudes drive legislative efforts to restrict spending in elections?

David Primo and Jeff Milo are authors of campaign finance and American democracy,

what the public really thinks, and why it matters.

We spoke late last year. Careful listeners to the Cato Daily Podcast will note that I never fail to point out when we're talking

about campaigned finance issues is that the public or at least people who

talk about Citizens United almost including the news media who really should be more attuned to what the implications of that case are for them

fundamentally do not understand what that case was about and what the Supreme Court said.

So just using that as an example,

what do we know about what the public thinks about campaign finance issues.

So I'll take that one.

You know, both Dave Primo and I have studied money in politics for many years and it's fair to say that

the general public has this conventional wisdom that there's too much money in

politics that elective offices are essentially for sale to the highest bidder that campaign contributions are the functional equivalent of bribes that all of this alienates the public results in declining trust and leads to

corruption in politics and and as a result that there's a great need for

campaign finance reform to preserve the integrity of democracy.

And in addition to just asserting that that's a conventional wisdom in our book, we conduct

a survey of the general public and and sure enough these kinds of

propositions people agree in fact the the level of agreement is on the order of

89% or more agree that, for example, elections are essentially

...