The previous two posts in the democracy series argued that our system makes voting harder than it needs to be and produces candidates that most Americans – across the political spectrum – assess as self-serving and unresponsive. Both of those problems have structural causes and structural solutions.
This post is about the structural problem that underlies both of them, and most of the others: money.
Not money in the abstract sense of economic inequality – though that matters and will get its own post later in this series. Money in the specific sense of political spending: the role that wealthy donors, corporations, and special interest groups play in determining who runs for office, who wins, and what policies get pursued once they are in office.
This is the problem that makes most other democratic reforms harder to achieve. It is also, remarkably, one of the issues on which ordinary Americans across the political spectrum agree most clearly – which makes the gap between what voters want and what the system produces especially instructive.
What Voters Actually Agree On
Start with the polling, because it is more striking than most people realize.
Overwhelming majorities of both Republican and Democratic voters believe that the cost of political campaigns makes it hard for good people to run for office. They believe that special interest groups, lobbyists, large donors, and wealthy individuals have too much say in policy. They believe that politicians run for office in significant part to make money and accumulate personal influence. And they believe that laws could fix these problems if the political will existed to pass them.
This is not a left-right disagreement. It is a broad public consensus that the political financing system is broken, that it benefits a small number of people at the expense of everyone else, and that something should be done about it.
The reason nothing has been done – or more precisely, the reason the most significant attempt to do something was largely dismantled – is itself a demonstration of the problem.
What Happened to Campaign Finance Reform
In 2002, Congress passed the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act – known as McCain-Feingold after its primary sponsors, one Republican and one Democrat. Its goals were specific: prohibit national political parties from raising or spending money outside federal limits, and restrict corporations and unions from using their funds to run issue-based political ads close to an election.
The fact that a significant campaign finance reform bill passed with genuine bipartisan support in the current era of polarization is itself remarkable. It reflected the broad public consensus that already existed.
The Supreme Court subsequently struck down most of its key provisions. The most significant ruling came in Citizens United v. FEC in 2010, which held that political spending is a form of protected speech under the First Amendment, and that corporations and other organizations cannot be limited in their independent political expenditures. The practical result was the creation of Super PACs – political action committees that can raise and spend unlimited amounts on behalf of candidates, as long as they do not formally coordinate with those campaigns.
The formal non-coordination requirement has been widely criticized as effectively unenforceable. The result is a system in which unlimited money flows into political campaigns through vehicles that are nominally independent, in which the sources of that money are often difficult to trace, and in which the candidates most likely to benefit are those whose policy positions align with the interests of large donors.
In plain terms, the Court made it much harder for elected officials to limit independent political spending, even when that spending gives wealthy interests far more influence than ordinary citizens.
Applying the Standard
The Golden Rule Test asks whether we would design this system if we did not know which position we would occupy.
Would a rational person, not knowing whether they would be a billionaire with strong preferences about tax policy and regulation, or an ordinary citizen with no ability to write large checks, design a political financing system in which the size of your financial contribution determines the volume of your political voice?
The answer is no. A rational person behind the veil of ignorance would want a system in which political influence is distributed more equally among citizens – not perfectly equally, because people will always find ways to participate more than others, but not so unequally that the political preferences of a small number of extraordinarily wealthy individuals systematically outweigh the preferences of millions of ordinary voters.
The Outcomes Test asks what the current system actually produces. The research on this is consistent: the policy positions of wealthy Americans and organized interest groups are significantly more likely to be reflected in legislation than the policy positions of average citizens, even when those positions are held by large majorities. A landmark study by Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page found that when the preferences of economic elites conflict with the preferences of the general public, the elites’ preferences prevail the great majority of the time. Majority public opinion, by itself, has very little independent effect on policy outcomes.
That is not a description of a functioning democracy. It is a description of a system in which money translates into policy influence in ways that the formal structures of democratic representation are supposed to prevent.
The Distal Test asks whose interests are absent from the room. In a system where political access is significantly determined by the ability to write large checks, the people most structurally absent are those without resources – which is to say, the majority of citizens, and most acutely the citizens whose lives are most directly affected by the policies being made.
The Constitutional Problem and the Path Around It
The Supreme Court’s rulings on campaign finance are grounded in First Amendment reasoning: political spending is speech, and speech cannot be restricted without compelling justification. This makes federal legislative reform difficult within the existing constitutional framework.
The path around this is a constitutional amendment – one that clarifies that the First Amendment does not prevent Congress and state legislatures from regulating the role of money in political campaigns. Such an amendment has been proposed in nearly every session of Congress since the Citizens United ruling. It has attracted significant co-sponsorship at various points without advancing to a vote.
The reason it has not advanced is the same reason most democratic reform is difficult: the people who would need to vote for it are among the primary beneficiaries of the current system. Members of Congress who have built their political careers on large-donor fundraising networks have limited incentive to dismantle those networks, regardless of what their constituents want.
This is the structural trap at the center of democratic reform: the system that needs to be changed is controlled by the people who benefit from it. Which is precisely why the Article V convention process – in which states can force a constitutional convention without congressional approval – matters here as well as for term limits. Twenty-five states have passed resolutions supporting a constitutional amendment on campaign finance reform.
What an Amendment Would Need to Accomplish
At minimum, a constitutional amendment on campaign finance would need to do two things.
First, it would need to clarify that Congress and state legislatures have the authority to regulate the raising and spending of money in political campaigns – including by corporations, unions, and other organized entities – without those regulations being struck down as violations of the First Amendment.
Second, it would need to establish that this regulatory authority extends to independent expenditures – the Super PAC spending that Citizens United specifically protected – and not only to direct contributions to candidates.
What the amendment does not need to do is specify exactly how that regulation should work. The details of contribution limits, disclosure requirements, and public financing options can and should be worked out through the legislative process. The amendment just needs to restore the constitutional space for those legislative choices to be made.
Public Financing as a Positive Alternative
Beyond restricting the influence of large private money, there is a positive reform worth considering: public financing of elections.
Several states and cities have experimented with public financing systems, in which candidates who agree to limit their fundraising from private sources receive public matching funds that allow them to compete without building large-donor networks. New York City’s matching funds program – which provides public dollars at a significant ratio for small contributions from ordinary constituents – has been studied extensively and shown to increase the diversity of candidates, increase the participation of small donors, and reduce the relative influence of large donors.
These systems are not without costs – public financing requires public money – but those costs need to be weighed against what the alternative produces. A system in which the candidates most likely to win are those best able to raise money from wealthy donors is a system that filters for a particular kind of candidate before voters ever see a ballot. Public financing changes that filter.
The Deeper Point
The problem with money in politics is not simply that wealthy people have more political influence than poor people – though that is a problem. It is that the current system creates a structural alignment between the interests of large donors and the behavior of elected officials that operates independently of what voters want.
When a senator votes against popular legislation because a major donor opposes it, that senator is not necessarily doing anything illegal. They are responding rationally to the incentive structure the system has built. Changing behavior requires changing the incentive structure – which means changing the financing system, not just electing better people.
The Public Dignity Standard asks whether our institutions treat people as fully human – whether they protect dignity, reduce suffering, and apply the same standard to everyone. A political financing system that gives some citizens vastly more political voice than others, in proportion to their wealth rather than their stake in the outcomes, fails that standard plainly.
It does not apply the same standard to everyone.
It does not account for the people most affected by the policies being financed.
And by the consistent evidence of political science research, it does not produce the outcomes that a functioning democracy is supposed to produce.
A government that is of the people, by the people, and for the people cannot also be of the donors, by the donors, and for the donors.
At some point, we have to choose.
Recommended Reading
- Lawrence Lessig, Republic, Lost — a major argument about money, dependence, and institutional corruption in American politics.
- Martin Gilens, Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America — a foundational study of how policy responsiveness differs across income groups.
- Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens” — a landmark article on the relative influence of economic elites, organized interest groups, and average citizens on U.S. policy outcomes.
- Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, Winner-Take-All Politics — an influential account of how political organization, policy choices, and economic inequality reinforce one another.
- Jane Mayer, Dark Money — a detailed journalistic account of wealthy donor networks and their influence on American politics.
- Richard L. Hasen, Plutocrats United: Campaign Money, the Supreme Court, and the Distortion of American Elections — a legal and democratic critique of campaign finance doctrine after Citizens United.
- Robert A. Dahl, On Political Equality — a concise democratic-theory foundation for thinking about equal citizenship and unequal political influence.
- E. E. Schattschneider, The Semisovereign People — a classic work on unequal political organization and why some interests are represented more effectively than others.
- Sidney Verba, Kay Lehman Schlozman, and Henry E. Brady, Voice and Equality: Civic Voluntarism in American Politics — a major study of unequal political participation and why some citizens have more political voice than others.
- Brennan Center for Justice, Citizens United, Explained — an accessible overview of Citizens United, Super PACs, dark money, and the campaign finance system after 2010.