Balkinization

The Internet and The Future of Campaign Finance

Many progressives are distressed that Howard Dean has chosen to forgo matching funds for the primary season, believing that it heralds the death of campaign finance regulation. I am somewhat less concerned.

There are three basic reasons to restrict campaign finance. The first is that you don't want elections decided simply by who raises more money so that the policy differences between the candidates become essentially irrelevant to determining who wins. The second is that you are worried that the drive to raise funds will produce an arms race that will divert representatives from governing because it will force them to spend more and more time raising funds and cuddling up to wealthy donors. Third, you are worried that there will be corruption or at least the appearance of corrpution-- Even if large donations do not result in quid pro quos, they do help secure access to the candidate and thus predispose candidates toward the interests of the very rich and powerful.

Raising funds through the Internet, which the Dean campaign has pioneered, changes the picture somewhat. The Internet makes it possible to raise lots of money in relatively small sums from a very large number of people. That means that an increasing percentage of a campaign's money comes from small scale Internet donations. Then the second concern is reduced because it takes less of the candidate's time to raise money. Rather, the candidate needs a better infrastructure to organize and deliver contributions. He or she can spend more time campaigning rather than courting individual donors because campaigning reaches a broader audience and thus produces more funds. The third concern is reduced because the distribution of contributions is flatter. That means that there are fewer people who can genuinely claim the right to specialized access, which tends to lessen the problem of corruption or the appearance thereof. And, I would argue, the first concern is somewhat reduced because the ability to raise funds is more genuinely correlated with popular support. The candidate who raises the most money is the candidate who can energize the most people to support him or her financially.

Is Internet financing of campaigns a panacea? No, not by a long shot. But we can hope that Dean's Internet model eventually comes to dominate the model that President Bush has adopted, which relies on contributions from wealthy individuals whom the President has rewarded with very large tax breaks. When you think about it, the President and his donor base have been engaged in a not very subtle quid pro quo: He lowers tax rates on the wealthiest Americans, and they, in turn, do their best to get him elected. Bush's strategy raises all three of the concerns mentioned above-- money displacing votes, the arms race, and the danger of corruption-- much more than the Internet model.

So there is reason to be glad about what Dean is doing. If he demonstrates that his model works, and and if both major parties turn to the Internet and to a broad base of smaller contributions as the best way to finance a campaign, we will ameliorate the influence of money on politics. That is not because there will be less money in the system, but because it will be raised and delivered to the candidates in ways less corrosive of the democratic process. There is still much more that we could do: for example, we could make candidates less dependent on fundraising by creating a bank of media time distributed to candidates for public office. In any case, the campaign finance system in this country is badly broken; we need to think how to make it work for democracy rather than against it.

Posted 11:44 PM by JB [link]