This is the thirteenth in the series documenting campaign finance in presidential election years. Herbert Alexander began these studies in 1960, relying on press estimates and rather dubious claims from campaigners of how little they had spent. From 1976 he and his successors have drawn on the data supplied by campaigners to the Federal Election Commission under the requirements of one of the most detailed reporting regimes in the world. So onerous are these requirements that McCain's presidential campaign spent over $16 million in 2008 to comply with them. It perhaps reflects the vastness of the data now available that this book was published nearer to the next presidential election than to the one it reports upon.

The contents are similar to those of the previous edition, providing reliable and detailed coverage of the legal framework, the funding of the presidential nominations, the elections for President and Congress, and the financial role of political parties and interest groups. As in several recent editions, there is a concluding chapter on lessons for reformers seeking to change the law, a reminder that innovations in campaign finance are perpetually under discussion.

Though the last major reform of campaign finance legislation, the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA), was enacted prior to the 2004 election, Corrado shows that the regulatory environment had altered again by the time of the 2008 contest. The Supreme Court decision in the two Wisconsin Right to Life cases removed a ban on issue advertising that was one of BCRA's key restrictions and decisions in lower courts altered other regulations around the ways interest groups spend in campaigns. His chapter was also written sufficiently recently to include the 2010 decision in Citizens United in which the court stretched still further the spending of unlimited amounts of money to equate with the First Amendment exercise of freedom of speech, ensuring that the next presidential election will again be fought under different financing rules than the previous one.

Near to $6 billion was spent in the 2008 federal elections, a 30 percent increase compared to four years earlier. Spending on the presidential contest (nomination and election) almost doubled. Obama was the first candidate to forgo public funding for both the nomination and the general election since its inception in 1976, and his capacity to raise money will be one of the enduring impressions left by the 2008 campaign. Though press reports showed a fascination with the novelty of his campaign's reliance on small contributions raised via the Internet, John Green and Diana Kingsbury show that his early fund-raising efforts were more conventional, drawing on relatively large donations. Only after his victory over Clinton in the Iowa caucuses did small sums begin to flow. For the November election Obama had at least a $150 million spending advantage over McCain, facilitating far more advertising in battleground states. It also enabled the campaign to staff many more local offices than their opponents. If Obama's was the more professional campaign, so it should have been given the number of professionals it employed.

Allan Cigler's chapter on interest groups demonstrates the ingenuity of organized donors in adapting to a changing regulatory framework. In the first post-BCRA election in 2004, 527 groups (named after the tax code which defines their permissible activities) proliferated once soft-money contributions to parties were banned. One such group, Swift Boat Veterans and POWs for Truth, funded that year's most effective campaign ad. But 527s quickly became passé, their role diminished by stricter rule enforcement by the Federal Election Commission – equating them to the political action committees – and the imposition of hefty fines which penalized some of their activities in 2004. A different legal entity, the 501(c), helped to fill the gap, accounting for three times as much spending as four years earlier.

In the concluding chapter Thomas Mann contemplates the gloomy prospects for liberal reform. A conservative Supreme Court dedicatedly protects election spending as a First Amendment right, permitting restrictions only to prevent corruption or its appearance. Only where money changes hands is there a risk of corruption so those who spend their own money are beyond control. In this hostile regulatory environment, Mann can propose only the encouragement of small individual contributions and greater transparency.