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Campaign finance reform is the subject of ongoing public policy debates in many modern democratic societies. In the United States, individuals and interest groups from across the ideological spectrum have proposed or embraced a variety of campaign finance reforms in attempts to alter the electoral landscape. At least one recent presidential candidate highlighted the issue of campaign finance reform which appear to resonate with voters, as part of a broader strategy to secure his party's nomination. Many of these reforms propose to alter the sources and uses of financial resources in Congressional elections.

Within the context of a game-theoretic model with incomplete information, three dimensions of performance are defined and used to evaluate and analyze an institutionalized legislature. The performance of an institutionalized legislature is also compared to that of a noninstitutionalized legislature, one without any internal differentiation and in which members are equally uninformed about key parameters of the choice environment. Among the results are that increasing institutionalization (lower member turnover and the application of universal decision criteria) can diminish legislative performance. Additionally, a noninstitutionalized legislature always dominates the institutionalized legislature on at least one performance dimension. Institutionalization is neither necessary nor sufficient for superior legislative performance.