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tributions to candidate election campaigns are regulated. But here I
want to emphasize that certain areas of growing importance are
entirely unregulated:
"
Soft money: soft money given to political parties for activities
allegedly unrelated to federal elections for example, get-out-
the-vote campaigns by a state Democratic or Republican Party
is entirely unrestricted by federal law.20 Such soft money con-
tributions grew by 206 percent between 1992 and 1996, to the
current level of $262 million. Whereas corporations and unions
are prohibited from contributing money from their treasury to a
candidate, they can contribute soft money, with no restrictions on
amounts.
"
Issue ads: spending on issue ads is also unregulated by federal
law, because such advocacy is not explicit in its endorsement of
candidates. So corporations and unions can spend as they wish
on issue advocacy, with no disclosure requirements. Absent such
requirements, the estimate of $150 million in 1996 is inevitably
Money, Politics, Political Equality 57
speculative, but everyone agrees that issue ads are growing in
importance.
"
Candidate spending: out-of-pocket spending by candidates is
unregulated: the cases of Ross Perot, Steve Forbes, and Michael
Huffington are the most famously large doses of such spending.
"
Independent expenditures: whereas contributions to organizations
that engage in independent expenditures are regulated, the extent
of such expenditures cannot be regulated. The importance of such
spending has grown fourfold between 1994 and 1996, to $22
million because the Supreme Court decided that spending by
parties on candidate elections cannot be regulated unless that
spending is expressly coordinated with the candidate. But con-
tribution limits for donations to parties are much higher than
limits on giving to individual campaigns: individuals can give
$40,000 to a party in an election cycle (half during the primary
season, and half for the general election), and only $2000 to a can-
didate. So I can give $20,000 to the Democratic Party to spend on
vote-for-Kennedy ads promoting Ted Kennedy over other Demo-
cratic hopefuls for Senator, and then another $20,000 to support
Kennedy in the general election. So long as the Democrats don t
ask Kennedy how to spend the money, there is no problem.
Money Matters In 1996, the candidate who outspent his or her oppo-
nent won 92 percent of the House races and 88 percent of the Senate
races. These high correlations of spending and winning are typical. But
they leave open questions of fact and interpretation about the political
difference that money makes, even in the relatively well-defined arena
of candidate elections, much less in the wider arena of political influ-
ence. For three things are true:
i. The bigger spender tends to win.
ii. Incumbents tend to win.
iii. Incumbents tend to be better fund-raisers.
The trick is to provide a consistent and empirically tenable interpreta-
tion of these facts. For example, the correlation between spending and
electoral advantage may be spurious, as incumbency may directly
confer both. Or perhaps, instead, incumbency confers some fund-
raising advantage, and the money in turn directly confers electoral
advantage apart from any direct, nonpecuniary incumbency advan-
tage. The truth appears to be the latter: whereas incumbency makes it
easier to raise money and independently easier to win elections, the
money itself confers electoral benefit, as we see in open-seat races.
Moreover, challengers who spend more than incumbents do have
58 Joshua Cohen
considerably greater chances of winning than challengers who spend
less.21
Second, if incumbents are good at raising money (which confers elec-
toral benefit), that might be because incumbents are a survivor popu-
lation of especially talented candidates and talent attracts money. Or
it might be that the powers of officeholding confer an advantage in
fund-raising, because contributors (individuals and particularly orga-
nized groups) want to curry favor with officeholders as a result of the
powers associated with offices, and/or because reelection-seeking
officeholders need to please potential contributors, and have a capac-
ity to please according to the powers of their office. On this issue, the
answer seems not to be that officeholders are a survivor population of
high quality candidates, but that officeholding itself creates an advan-
tage in fund-raising. Contributors care about the capacity to deliver
results; they therefore pay attention to the offices held by elected offi-
cials, and invest in those who, by virtue of their official positions, have
that capacity.22
Putting the complexities to the side, what seems undeniable is that
candidate success depends on fund-raising success, that the capacity
to raise money depends on performance, that candidates must there-
fore be especially attentive in their conduct to attract support from the
groups that give, and that, by providing such support, contributors
gain some measure of influence over electoral outcomes.
To summarize these four observations, then: formal politics is getting
more expensive, just as the flow of money unregulated by sum or
source is increasing. Because of these increasing costs, and because
money is important to electoral success, candidates must be espe-
cially arguably increasingly attentive to the interests and concerns
of the relatively small and unrepresentative group of citizens who
spend money on politics and thus provide essential resources for
running a modern campaign.
4 Getting the Problem Right
Contemporary discussion of reform tends to focus on one of three
issues: that too much money is being spent in the aggregate; that can-
didates are spending too much time raising money and courting
donors; and that donors get political favors in return for their contri-
butions or other forms of spending. I don t think that any of these three
concerns get to the heart of the problem.
The first strikes me as weightless: if campaigns were well run,
debated real issues, genuinely reached most citizens, and provided
them with essential information, why would we think that $2 billion
Money, Politics, Political Equality 59
over a two-year election cycle is too much to spend? Perhaps we are
not spending enough.
Are candidates spending too much time fund-raising? Perhaps.
Dick Morris reports that President Clinton complained bitterly about
time spent fund-raising: I can t think. I can t act. I can t do anything
but go to fund-raisers and shake hands. 23 And Vincent Blasi has made
a forceful case that time devoted to fund-raising injures the democra-
tic process by limiting the capacity of representatives to do their
principal work information gathering, constituency service, deliber-
ating, legislating.24 But the case for reducing the sheer time spent
raising funds is not so clear. Suppose, once more, that we had a system [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]