This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, June 8, 2012. I'm Caleb Brown.

Did Big Money win the Wisconsin Governor's Office for Scott Walker?

After tens of millions of dollars spent on that race, the needle barely

budged.

And what happens when money gets spent in political races?

John Samples, director of the Cato Institute Center for Representative Representative Government argues that money is used to inform voters.

Politics means a lot of things to people and one of the things that really makes campaign finance regulation attractive is that among other things it provides

explanations when things go badly and you can really attribute bad events to the fact that oh well big money or these sort of vile forces at

work that aren't democratic that aren't legitimate they came in here and

they caused this I mean you just don't hear people saying

well gee you know the public really isn't on our side here in Wisconsin on these

issues or that the taxpayers are maybe a diverse

group of people who have figured out that public sector unions are a small concentrated interest group that is exploiting the taxpayer.

Nothing that no one's going to say they like that. No, it's the devil showed up and caused all these problems.

It does, you know, you always have to go around thinking about the empirics of it.

Did it actually have effects?

Because it is true, apparently, that it's very hard to tell, but it does seem

that the Walker allies outspent the other side, the side trying to remove Walker.

Now that's, there's a number of things to say about that.

One is that generally the story has been in political science and people who study campaigns that, you know, spending money on ads is a lot less effective than having a lot of organizational muscle.

And labor unions had put a lot of money

into the Wisconsin struggle.

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