This Policy Lab will engage students who are interested in campaign finance reform and/or the future of political communication on the Internet. The research projects students will undertake involve the effect of the transition from television to the internet as the principal mode of political campaigning. Research will include assessments of candidate, party and independent spending on different forms of communication in the ongoing presidential election campaign, investigation into rules for political communication on major internet platforms (e.g., Facebook, Google/YouTube, Twitter), and review of the relevant literature on campaign finance and political communication. The client is the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, DC, which will house a campaign finance reform commission that will be tracking developments during the 2016 campaign. Opportunities for research on campaign finance issues, more generally, will also be part of this policy lab in subsequent months. After the term begins, students accepted into the course can transfer from section (01) into section (02), which meets the R requirement, with consent of the instructor.

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