2007 E.E. Schattschneider Award

Awarded for the best doctoral dissertation submitted in calendar years 2005 and 2006 in the field of American government and politics

Award Committee: Byron Shafer, Chair, University of Wisconsin; Amy Fried, University of Maine; Laura Stoker, University of California

Recipient: Michael M. Franz, Bowdoin College

Dissertation: “Choices and Changes: Interest Groups in the Electoral Process”

Dissertation Chair: Kenneth Goldstein, University of Wisconsin

Citation: We are delighted to award the 2007 E.E. Schattschneider Prize to Michael M. Franz for “Choices and Changes: Interest Groups in the Electoral Process.” In the dissertation, Franz tackles a major (and recurrently controversial) aspect of American politics, the raising and spending of campaign cash. Why, he asks specifically, was there an unprecedented surge in unregulated campaign expenditures in the 1990s, even though the statutes governing such spending had been unchanged since the 1970s? Under what conditions, he asks generally, do interest groups adopt or change spending strategies? In pursuit of answers, Franz mobilizes an impressive array of cross-sectional and longitudinal datasets, including a major one that is entirely new. As a result, he has things to say about both strategy and structure in American politics.

Building on the files of the Federal Election Commission—and anyone who has ever worked with these data knows how much further transformation is required to make them speak accurately to political questions—Franz argues that interest groups changed electioneering tactics as the ideological and partisan make-up of Congress changed, as they learned via FEC advisory opinions just what did and did not amount to a legal violation, and as the ability to shape election outcomes using "hard" money declined. As Congress became more ideologically polarized, as party control of each chamber increasingly became seen as “up for grabs,” as FEC advisory opinions surged, and as campaigns costs and inflation made hard-money contributions less effective tools, interest groups tactics shifted in clear and important ways.

Franz’s dissertation contains a wealth of descriptive findings. For example, he confirms that the Political Action Committees that are major players in one area of campaign finance, as with so-called "hard" money, tend to be major players in the others, as with "soft" money, and indeed that they tend to move quickly into whole new areas, like the "527" organizations of 2004.

More strategically, Franz shows that most such organizations tend to be drawn, in their contributions, to more competitive rather than less competitive races. In general, money follows the real level of partisan competition. Though not for every group: there are organized interests for whom the continuity of incumbents, of whichever party, is more important than the fate even of attractive challengers. Thus the specific nature of the policy arena at issue also matters.

Lastly, Franz demonstrates a remarkable pattern of organized giving, in which strategic incentives end up by creating a different overall structure to American politics. In this, as groups have shifted, in a closely divided partisan world, from bipartisan to single-party patterns of giving, they have simultaneously sharpened the partisanship and polarization that originally began to elicit this pattern of giving. In the process, a strategic response has become instead a crucial underpinning to the current political order.

Along the way, the creation of an essentially new dataset, involving the rulings, court challenges, but especially advisory opinions of the FEC—and the reactions of Political Action Committees to them—permit a systematic picture of a very different aspect of the relationship between PACs and politics, in which the PACs both respond to FEC rules but also labor to shape them, and then react quickly to any reshaping.

We think that the combination is the best available examination of organized interests in the electoral process, and richly deserves the Schattschneider Prize for 2007.