The Campaign Finance Institute, a division of the National Institute on Money in State Politics

CFI's mission is to produce objective and academically credible research about money in politics to serve the needs of those in the policy community who are working to improve democratic representation, along with the needs of journalists and other thought leaders who want to help citizens better understand how the system is working. CFI also creates and freely disseminates tools to stimulate new scholarly research, along with other tools to be used by a more general audience of “citizen policy analysists".

CFI's unique approach to serving these goals is emphasized in these four arenas:

• Broadening participation: CFI has been a leader over the past decade in stimulating an interest in and knowledge of policies designed to increase the role of small donors. This will continue, with an emphasis on comparing the many varieties of policy alternatives in states and localities that claim to serve the same goal.

• Understanding New Structures: Thinking seriously about the future should be based on a firm grasp of where one now stands. Much of the critical commentary after Citizens United was based on stylized and oversimplified understandings. CFI's work has enriched our grasp of the new kind of organizations now participating in federal and state politics. This work will deepen in 2016-18.

• Expanding the Policy Knowledge Base: CFI's work is based on the idea that policy should be built on the best possible knowledge base. Testing the impact of public policy choices is much enhanced by looking across jurisdictions and over time. Unfortunately, this has not been possible in the field of money in politics. CFI, on the recommendation of scholars in the field, is now developing an historical 50-state database of state campaign finance laws to empower such research. A simple, look-up version will also be designed for the general user.

• Ongoing products and utilities: CFI will continue developing and updating its historically consistent federal and state statistics to help journalists and others put current developments into context.

The Campaign Finance Institute (CFI) occupies a unique position in the money-and-politics infrastructure. There are many public interest and advocacy organizations working in the field of money and politics, as well as two very good data repositories. However there are no other policy analysis research institutes with ongoing expertise in the field of money and politics. First, CFI as a research institute stands between data providers and policy makers without being activists. In this capacity CFI is a power user of the state and federal data that others generate, using them to produce serious, detailed and timely analyses for policy makers, activists, and journalists, as well as scholars. Second, CFI is also not the same as a department of pure theory-building scholars. Instead, CFI is a boutique think tank – the nation's only nonpartisan and objective research institute focused solely on money in politics. As an institute run by scholars, the core of its research is designed to meet standards of peer review. And yet, the work clearly is applied research. Third, as an applied research institute with staff, rather than a network of scholars working on discrete projects, CFI is in a position to provide information and analyses to policy makers in real time as they deliberate. As an ongoing and specialized organization, CFI is consistently publishing material that keeps its tools sharp and available for use on priority subjects as needed. In addition, CFI also has both the time and the will to “translate" what is known from the academic literature into salient documents for policy makers.

CFI has been collaborating with the National Institute on Money in State Politics (NIMSP) for years, starting with CFI’s groundbreaking research on small donors, which was often built up from NIMSP’s data.Both organizations realized how much more we could do if we integrated our data, experience, knowledge, and skills. The synergies are obvious to those of us who have worked together. CFI’s becoming part of NIMSP offers huge opportunities for advancing the field – well beyond anything we at CFI could have imagined if we continued trying to do it all on our own.

NIMSP has been promoting an accountable democracy for nearly two decades by compiling and standardizing comprehensive campaign-donor, lobbyist, and other information from all fifty states and the federal government. CFI has also been at work for nearly two decades, earning a reputation as the nation’s preeminent think tank on money in politics.

Nesting CFI within NIMSP raises this collaboration to a new level. Each organization has done valuable work separately by using the differences among states to help understand the effects of federal, state, and local campaign laws. The expanded NIMSP will have the resources and skills not only to continue, but to look at more jurisdictions and more programs more deeply. It will bring new data and new research to produce new insights. The results will continue to inform scholars and journalists. It will also guide agencies, lawmakers, activists, and others to develop more effective policies. Our democracy will be the better for it.