Abstract
In 1976, when a system to publicly finance Minnesota's state legislative elections was introduced, the legislation's proponents claimed it would make elections to the legislature more competitive. An observer, however, might conclude that the incumbency advantage has increased since the introduction of public financing. When we introduce a variety of controls and examine the data with multivariate regression, we find that public financing did in fact go a long way toward increasing the competitiveness of Minnesota's legislative elections.