USC political scientist was a pioneer in the field of campaign finance studies

Herbert E. Alexander, a longtime USC political scientist who pioneered the field of campaign finance studies, died of cancer Thursday at a hospice in Rockville, Md. He was 80.

Alexander established himself as an authority on election spending and fundraising in 1962, when he published “Financing the 1960 Election,” the first of nine comprehensive studies over four decades that analyzed how money flowed through presidential and other federal campaigns.

Alexander’s work directly influenced the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971, a major law that tightened contribution limits and disclosure requirements for donations, according to Larry J. Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. Another outgrowth of his research was the creation in 1975 of the Federal Election Commission, the agency responsible for enforcing federal campaign finance laws.

“Herb Alexander was the most significant scholar in the field of campaign finance for 40 years,” Sabato said in an interview last week. “His many books and articles on the subject are the foundation for the modern study of the subject.”

The campaign reform act was signed into law by President Nixon, whose reelection staff then proceeded to violate it by setting up slush funds and using campaign dollars to pay for break-ins.

When the Senate opened its probe of the Watergate scandal in 1973, it sought the advice of Alexander, who was “the only one who had looked at the budgets of campaigns and the amount of cash they had,” said Kent Cooper, a former assistant staff director at the Federal Election Commission.

Alexander literally had written the books on the three elections before the Watergate break-in, in 1960, 1964 and 1968.

“He really helped define and craft a whole new field,” Cooper said. “People studied election results and methods of voting, but not the role money plays because they never had the data available. Herb really rode that early crest of disclosures and said, ‘Now we’ve got to look at how [campaign spending] helped educate . . . and persuade voters.’ ”

Born in Waterbury, Conn., on Dec. 21, 1927, Alexander earned a bachelor’s degree in political science at the University of North Carolina, a master’s at the University of Connecticut and, in 1958, a doctorate at Yale University. He taught at Princeton University on and off through the 1960s and ‘70s.

For his dissertation, he compiled campaign finance figures for a national study by George Alexander Heard, a political scientist who later headed Vanderbilt University.

Heard’s study spurred the creation in 1958 of the Citizens Research Foundation, which is dedicated to public education about campaign financing. Herbert Alexander was its director for 40 years and compiled his studies of federal election financing under its auspices.

The foundation was based for many years at Princeton and later at USC. After Alexander’s retirement in 1998, it moved to UC Berkeley, where it is part of the Institute of Governmental Studies.

When Heard was appointed chairman of President Kennedy’s Commission on Campaign Costs in 1961, he hired Alexander as executive director. The commission’s work laid the foundation for modern political finance reform in recommendations that encompassed the creation of the Federal Election Commission and a panoply of new laws requiring federal funding of presidential transition costs, contribution disclosures, tax incentives for small political donations and public financing of presidential campaigns.

In the early years before those new laws were enacted, campaign finance information was closely guarded by partisan officials, chiefly the clerks of the House and the Senate.

“You couldn’t take a typewriter into the office of the clerk of the House,” Alexander told a USC interviewer in 1995. “You couldn’t get a photocopy of filings made by candidates or committees. You had to say what you were doing and why. The whole system was designed to discourage inquiry.”

Alexander relied on his contacts and powers of persuasion to pry loose the figures he needed for his studies.

He attended every Democratic and Republican national convention from 1960 to 1992 and developed relationships with party officials and campaign operatives. They eventually began not only to trust him but to rely on his quadrennial analyses to understand trends.

He opposed stringent campaign contribution limits, arguing that they favored incumbents with their broader base of supporters. He preferred government subsidies for campaigns. “The most important effect of the public financing system, symbolized by the success of Jimmy Carter, was the equalized chance it provided to qualified but little-known outsiders to compete effectively,” he told the Associated Press in 1979.

Although his studies showed campaign spending rising dramatically with each election cycle, he was not disturbed by the trend, as others were. He regarded election dollars as the “tuition” Americans pay for an education in politics and tried to offer a useful perspective on its importance relative to other expenses. He noted, for instance, that the $3.2 billion spent on the 1992 elections was less than Americans spent annually on dog food.

Alexander is survived by three sons, Michael of East Windsor, N.J.; Andrew of Toronto; and Kenneth of Olney, Md.; five grandchildren; and his companion, Barbara B. Seidel.

--

elaine.woo@latimes.com