An Uneasy Mixture

[G Gocek <gggman@att.net>]

This option, promoting unlimited campaign expenditures and tight prohibitions on non-disclosure of financial support, seems to want to have matters both ways. It denies the effectiveness of any spending controls, hypothesizing that politicians will always find a way around such restrictions and waste a great deal of effort in doing so. But it apparently proposes that airtight standards on publicizing the identities of contributors are always attainable and that the simple knowledge of who gives what will be enough to dissuade candidates from taking the reputational risk that they are beholden to special interests and thereby disadvantaged in an electoral competition.

To a great extent, the degree to which special interests contribute to various candidates across the election cycle is already known. Analysts regularly report on the expenditures of organizations from trial lawyers to health insurers to the AARP. That has not seemed to discourage their participation, nor has it made the politicians necessarily unwilling to accept the contributions. Further, under this proposal, there is no reason to think that a special interest would not like to hedge its bets by contributing to all candidates in a race, basically to ensure that political access is there regardless of the ultimate victor. Knowing that everyone running is in some way beholden to a particular contributor does not necessarily result in the certainty that the subsequent policy judgements followed will be the wisest course for that particular issue area.

Unlimited financial contributions would also increase the likelihood that people or groups with more disposable resources would have greater rein to exert political influence. On the individual level, if we think that the rich will necessarily have policy preferences that disagree with the sentiments of the bulk of voters, then this may indeed reduce the political influence of the average voter. Winning elections, of course, require a combination of both money and votes. So the fact that a candidate can craft a more elaborate message and run a more omnipresent campaign does not immediately imply an automatic victory if he is well out of step from the political preferences of a majority of voters.

Ultimately, the electoral process is a balancing system, in which voters weigh the pros and cons of alternatives and choose according to their judgement of what is probably to be most beneficial. Knowledge of sources of support can be a significant item to put on the scales to strike that balance. But it is unlikely to be totally determinative, so it is hard to envision a single step solution like this being completely sufficient to resolve all the shortcomings of representative democracy.

If a question of electoral efficiency and the scale of political resources is a major issue underlying the controversy on campaign finance, it would seem that the best place to put the spending focus should be on the overall result, not the intermediate steps of the process. For example, if we think that politicians are spending too much time raising money and thereby courting special interests, the most fruitful controls would seem to relate to the total amounts spent by campaigns, not the specific sources of dollars. 

Perhaps dollar limits could be set (and tightly monitored) on the spending of individual candidates, allowing a higher ceiling for challengers to offset the natural advantages of incumbents. The limits could be adjusted by jurisdiction based on the cost of campaigning in specific geographic areas (e.g. urban California vs. rural Mississippi) and an inflation escalator could be included to allow for rising costs over time. But the candidates could have complete freedom as to their contribution sources, as long as they were fully disclosed. They would then have to assess whether the risk of being associated with a few, well-heeled special interests offset the efficiency gains in not having to spend as much time on fundraising and the consequent freedom to concentrate on being a more effective legislator. The voters would then decide if the candidate struck a reasonable balance in positioning himself to represent their interests.