I’m on a continuing quest to get old files and things under some kind of control. Yesterday I dug into a small stack of old reports from the Campaign Spending Commission that date back into the 1980s and early 1990s.

Thumbing through a few, I thought it might be an opportunity to examine changes in campaign spending by corporations, unions, and PACs over time.

So I spent a couple of hours compiling this little table of reported spending by groups that were politically active during both the 1986 and 2010 election cycles. Both were elections in which Hawaii voted for a new governor, so they should be somewhat comparable.

The businesses and unions weren’t selected on any other criteria than ease of identifying them in the two lists.

There appear to be a few conclusions that can be drawn from this limited sample.

First, there’s a lot more money being spent today by PACs and other interest groups than there was in 1986. Overall, the amount spent by this sample of groups increased 493.9 percent. During the same period, the Honolulu’s consumer price index was up 115 percent, if I read the data correctly.

Some of the increase might have been the result of increased compliance with reporting requirements, and more active enforcement by the commission, but that’s hard to gauge.

Second, the increase was not across the board. Generally, increased spending by labor groups far exceeded that of businesses or industry PACs. My guess here is that as labor’s direct political influence has waned, unions have boosted their campaign spending in order to bolster what is left of their political clout.

Since successful prosecutions disrupted the “pay to play” links, real or perceived, many small or medium size businesses have cut back their political spending, and the recent recession took the wind out of the sails of larger corporations.

In any case, here’s my small attempt to put some data behind the general impression that money has become an much bigger issue in current elections.

The UH Professional Assembly, the university faculty union, had no spending listed in the 1986 commission report, although I believe the union was active during that year’s election. When UHPA again reported minimal spending during the 1990 election cycle, I filed a complaint with the commission. It’s the complaint that ultimately led to a First Amendment lawsuit and a decision in my favor by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals (see Lind v. Grimmer, 1994).

I haven’t found many documents from my original complaint to the commission, although I’ll keep looking. But I digress…here’s my list comparing election spending by PACs, corporations, and unions in 1986 and 2010.