Citizens United Bought . . . Nothing?

The answer is no. “Ten years after the ruling and for a wide range of outcomes, we are not able to identify economically or statistically significant effects of corporate independent expenditures on state tax policy, including tax rates, discretionary tax breaks, and tax revenues,” the study says. If billionaires were able to buy elections to lower state taxes, you’d think they would have done it by now.

The study, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, was conducted by three academics in the University of California system. Previous research has suggested that Citizens United increased political advertising. At the time of the ruling, the authors write, “23 states had laws that banned corporations from spending in state elections.” The Supreme Court’s decision “effectively invalidated these laws,” creating a natural experiment.

So what happened? Well, nothing, at least as far as state taxes are concerned. States modify their taxes all the time, but those affected by Citizens United didn’t act noticeably different from the baseline. “Overall, we can rule out tax decreases or increases that are larger in magnitude than average tax changes,” the authors say. The story is similar on tax revenues and incentives.

This kind of evidence is persuasive because tax policy affects the bottom line, so companies really care about it and they generally pull in the same direction. Careful academics that they are, the study’s authors caution that they can’t rule out small, marginal effects. Or maybe Citizens United wasn’t a turning point for taxes because those 23 state laws weren’t actually effective at limiting corporate influence in the first place.

But the authors are clearly skeptical of the obsession with the Supreme Court’s ruling. “Its critics warned of devastating impacts from independent spending by corporations,” they write. “The

New York Times

mentioned Citizens United in 580 articles over the next two years—an average of 0.8 articles per day!” In reality, the Supreme Court’s ruling was about free political speech, and the public can always make up its own mind. Voters are rarely as hypnotized by campaign ads as progressives think.