Honors Theses

Date of Award

8-2025

Document Type

Undergraduate Thesis

Degree Name

BS

Department

Political Science and Criminal Justice

Faculty Mentor

Thomas Shaw

Advisor(s)

Jaclyn Bunch, Scott Liebertz

Abstract

2010 saw the introduction of a new player on the field of electoral finance, the super PAC. This introduction came with much controversy due to the widespread fear that super PACs could undermine the election system by giving wealthy individuals or organizations an undue influence. The literature on super PACs influence on the electoral system is inconclusive, with different studies having mixed results, meaning more information needs to be gathered. In this paper, I attempt to learn more about super PACs influence, particularly on congressional elections, by examining the results of congressional elections across three states: Alabama, Georgia, and Florida. I ran several regressions examining the relationship between the percentage of votes a candidate received and whether or not a candidate was supported by a super PAC. I also controlled for other potentially influential variables such as incumbency, partisanship, gender, campaign funds, and election type (house or senate). The results indicated that super PAC support does increase vote percentage, but only by a relatively small amount when compared to incumbency and partisanship. The results of further robustness testing also indicated that super PACs have more influence if a candidate is a challenger.

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