Monica Youn · December 2013
81 GEO. WASH. L. REV. 2108 (2013)
Disclosure of campaign contributions and other political activities will always involve a tradeoff in which the benefits of disclosure are weighed against its costs to contributors and campaigns. Numerous recent papers have attempted to establish the extent and significance of the costs of disclosure— especially whether disclosure creates an unacceptable “chilling effect” on political participation. But little countervailing attention has been paid to the benefit side of the equation—specifically whether and how disclosure generates informational benefits that might outweigh its costs.
This Article provides a case study of a recent well-known episode in campaign finance disclosure: the extent to which members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints provided financial support for Proposition 8. The Article provides a detailed account of how this information came to public notice—through the work of two activists and an investigative journalist—and tracks the dissemination of this information through subsequent press reports.
The Proposition 8 case study complicates three commonly held assumptions regarding how voters make use of campaign finance data: (1) that only disclosures regarding interest group involvement or large contributions have significant informational value but that disclosure of modest individual contributions provides little useful information; (2) that once an interest group’s position is disclosed, additional disclosures regarding that interest group’s financial support for a candidate or cause are of little additional informational value; and (3) that the informational salience of campaign finance data is largely limited to a particular election cycle. The Article concludes by evaluating four categories of options for disclosure policy: full disclosure, no disclosure, aggregate disclosure, and “anonymized” disclosure.
