Kenneth R Mayer, Timothy Werner, “Electoral Transitions in Connecticut: The Implementation of Clean Elections in 2008,” University of Wisconsin-Madison, Paper prepared for delivery at the 2007 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, August 29-September 2, Chicago, IL.

This paper predicts, based on experience with systems in Maine and Arizona, that Connecticut will see greater competitiveness in elections once its new full public financing program is underway. Indeed, the authors believe that the more generous funding provided to candidates in Connecticut will lead to a greater effect in helping challengers than has been seen elsewhere. To back up their predictions, the authors do a detailed technical analysis comparing Connecticut to Maine, which is in the same region and whose legislature has a similar structure. The full version of the report is downloadable in pdf format.

Key excerpts follow [Emphases added]:

• [W]e think that the generous public funding grants, matching provisions, and high spending limits will dramatically reshape the campaign environment – well beyond the impact in the two other states [Maine and Arizona] that have adopted fullpublic funding. Once challengers, in particular, get past the initial qualification threshold they will haveaccess to unprecedented resources, up to eight times as much as they now spend...It is not much of a leap, therefore, to think that legislative elections will become far more competitive [in Connecticut].

• Elsewhere, we have analyzed how public funding has altered campaign competitiveness in Arizona and Maine, as well as the relationship between candidate gender and the decision to accept public money (Mayer, Werner and Williams 2006; Werner and Mayer 2007). We found a marginal increase in competitiveness – as measured by the percentage of incumbents who face a major party challenger, the percentage of incumbents who run in competitive races, and the incumbent reelection rate – in Arizona and Maine.
• [In Maine post-reform] there are far fewer low spending and high spending challengers: nearly every candidate on the ballot qualifies for public funding, so there are almost no publicly funded candidates who spend very small amounts....There are other clear effects of public funding on house challengers in Maine….Far more challengers [in post-reform Maine] are able to garner between 40 and 60% of the vote in the public funding system... Second, the relationship between spending and votes flatted out significantly once public funding became available. ….Even though public funding matter less for incumbents, these figures still support an argument we have made elsewhere: critics of public funding programs have little ground to stand on when arguing that they amount to incumbent protection programs (Mayer, Werner and Williams 2006).
  

• TThe effects of public funding, at least for challengers, stand out even more dramatically in senate races....As with the house, [in Maine] the introduction of public funding in senate elections flattened the relationship between spending and votes for both challengers and incumbents.