Herbert Alexander, 80; Studied Campaign Finance

Herbert E. Alexander, 80, a retired political scientist at the University of Southern California and a pioneer in the study of campaign finance, died April 3 of cancer at the Hebrew Home of Greater Washington. He lived at Leisure World in Silver Spring.

For 40 years, Dr. Alexander was director of the Citizens' Research Foundation, a nonprofit organization devoted to studying and reporting on how candidates for public office paid for their campaigns.

Before federal campaign finance disclosure laws were enacted, he had to rely on an ever-expanding roster of show-me-the-money contacts and on his own persistence at digging out names and numbers that campaigns were not necessarily eager to divulge. He attended every Democratic and Republican national convention from 1960 to 1992, meeting with party officials and campaign operatives, as well as fundraisers and donors.

"He always had a passion for it, an eat-sleep-and-drink-it passion," said Gloria Cornett, his longtime assistant director. She recalled how, in the early days of his research, he compiled index cards and columns of numbers by hand and how in interviews he would remember precise amounts from campaigns 20 years before.

Every four years, beginning in 1960, he published a study of how federal election campaigns, including presidential campaigns, were financed. His final study examined the 1992 election.

"These volumes remain an invaluable resource for scholars studying American political history," said John Samples of the Cato Institute in a recent blog. "These books were thorough and thoughtful, genuine scholarship on a topic that generates more than a little bluster."

Throughout his career, Dr. Alexander was scrupulously nonpartisan. Campaign operatives "knew he was going to report it fairly," Cornett said. "They knew he was a man of integrity."

Dr. Alexander was born in Waterbury, Conn. He served in the Army in Korea in the years between World War II and the Korean War, and he graduated from the University of North Carolina in 1949. He received a master's degree in political science from the University of Connecticut in 1951 and a doctorate in political science from Yale University in 1958. His mentor was Alexander Heard, former president of Vanderbilt University and the author of "The Costs of Democracy" (1960).

In 1961 and '62, he served as executive director of the President's Commission on Campaign Costs under President John F. Kennedy and later as a consultant to the president on legislation that grew out of the commission's report.

Some of the commission's recommendations were enacted quickly, including passage of a bill requiring the federal government to pay the transition costs for a newly elected president and vice president from Election Day until their inauguration. Recommendations to allow federal income tax incentives for small campaign contributions and a form of public financing for presidential campaigns were enacted as part of the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971.

Dr. Alexander advised numerous federal, state and local election agencies and was a consultant to the Senate Watergate investigations. He set up the Citizens' Research Foundation in 1958, and it moved with him when he joined the political science department at the University of Southern California in 1978. He and the foundation remained at USC until his retirement in 1998.

For 20 years, he served as chairman of the International Political Science Association's Research Committee on Political Finance and Political Corruption. As chairman, he edited two books comparing the U.S. system of political finance with those of other countries. He also was the author of more than 20 books, including "Money in Politics" (1972), and more than 375 monographs and articles.

When he moved to Silver Spring in 1998, he donated his personal library, including all of his writings, to the Campaign Finance Institute, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization affiliated with George Washington University.

Until a few weeks before his death, he was following with interest the presidential campaign. Although the amounts being raised were astronomical compared with the campaigns he examined at the beginning of his career, he continued to believe that transparency was more important than how much was being spent.

"It's been drummed into people time and again that money in politics is bad, that the people who give money are seeking some special favor, that the politicians are all on the take," he told the Seattle Times in 1998. "But sometimes it turns out all these wealthy people who give are just expressing their political views. The end result is messy and cluttered and contradictory -- sort of like democracy itself."

His wife, Nancy G. Alexander, died in 2000.

Survivors include his companion of six years, Barbara Seidel of Silver Spring; three sons, Michael Alexander of East Windsor, N.J., Andrew Alexander of Toronto and Kenneth Alexander of Olney; and five grandchildren.