political campaign finance essay

political campaign finance essay

The Importance of Political Campaign Finance Reform

1. Introduction

The influences of money on the political process are manifold. Large contributions can help any candidate to win election via a variety of targeted activities such as direct mailings, phone bank operations, as well as television advertising. The more expensive such efforts, and the costlier the media market, the stronger the role money can have in deciding election outcomes. Lipset, however, shows that money only truly becomes preeminent in political campaigns when the climactic message can be effectively transmitted through the most costly media, which is television. Since the most pivotal messages have the greatest reach, they can influence the most voters, and consequently have the most impact on the election. If media content and framing is of interest, it can be demonstrated that money does have a direct influence on the way issues and candidates are presented to the voters.

It is a common slogan that the price of democracy is eternal vigilance. But democracy, it seems, is getting increasingly tired – democracy is getting overdrawn. Politicians and parties are constantly on the lookout for the financial backing required for a successful campaign, while interest groups and wealthy captains of industry strive to influence the political process in order to secure benefits. The financial mining of the political landscape leaves voters at a disadvantage, and in the worst case scenario democracy itself may be undermined. This presumes, however, that the democratic process is distorted – that the results of elections do not reflect the will of the people due to the impact of money. Is this the case? When and why can the impediment of such an effect occur and is it possible to measure it anyway? Does it matter that much? If too much weight is attached to money, how can one arrest it? There are many controversial issues that impinge on the problem of money and democracy.

2. Current Issues in Political Campaign Finance

What are the solutions to these problems? Why are our current laws vulnerable to this? The problems stem from U.S. Supreme Court decisions that gave speech protection to corporate actors to support candidates; eliminated limits on candidate contribution support; and empowered PACs to coordinate with campaigns by creating a payment splash fund through increased individual contributions (soft money effort). Unfortunately, the entities that have benefited from these aggressive political financing rules have no incentive to change them. In the post-Citizens United v. FEC climate, protection of political speech and the public’s faith in a representative system are at dire odds economically, socially, and morally in states.

Thus, the reality is that powerful special interests exert enormous influence and control over our legislative process and in many cases they receive unfair advantage from proposed federal and state enactments. True to Milton Friedman’s perception, only the people with direct access to the political leaders can affect the legislative process.

While unlimited spending in political campaigns has been allowed for U.S. Supreme Court rulings for more than 50 years, it has reached a frenetic intensity in the last decade. By 2008 candidate election spending had tripled from 2000, and by 2012 had reached more than $1.5 billion, with outside, non-candidate spending tripling as well to approximately $1 billion. In 2016, Presidential candidate spending reached $2.25 billion, with a total of $6.5 billion spent on all federal races combined. Spending on non-federal elections approximated $2.25 billion. This trend worsened in 2020; total spending during the presidential race alone was estimated at $14 billion.

3. The Impact of Money on Politics

Even these large estimates may underestimate the genuine impact of money. For in equilibrium, some of the richer candidates figure out the other party’s strategy and respond by increasing their own advertising still further. Consequently, in the long-run a dollar of extra campaign spending only generates a little extra vote for a wealthy candidate. But while the votes ultimately accrue to the wealthy candidate, the wealth is initially not in the candidate’s election budget, but in their fundraising capacity. Moreover, campaigners have a range of options for legal avoidance. The rest of this section outlines the techniques which wealthy individuals and advocacy groups use to influence politics. The methods which are completely legal but which are used far less by the wealthy are not discussed.

The impact of money on politics. It is hardly news that money is important in politics. Numerous surveys have demonstrated that most members of the public assumed this before they were told. What appears less well known is the effect of campaign spending in determining who wins or loses. Campaign spending influences the vote for a number of reasons. Money buys exposure, it buys organization, and it buys program. Because of this, studies which have tried to tease out the causal effect of money by examining exogenous variation have sometimes come up with quite small estimates of the price per vote. However, surveys and natural experiments give much higher figures. The conglomerate US precincts where one has random variation in advertising due to interference from national elections and state borders, together with a uniform media market, indicate that an extra dollar of advertising increases the Republican vote by half a percentage point, and that money is the main reason why the Republicans typically triumph over the Democrats in elections in which media access is crucial.

4. Proposed Solutions for Campaign Finance Reform

Additionally, spending restrictions or direct contributions could also be imposed while still maintaining it without violating the Constitution, as was related in cases according to Buckley v. Valeo, 1976, and McCutcheon v. FEC. In particular, the limits can be raised with the adjustment of inflation for individuals and political action committees’ limits on how much they could give, how much the candidate or candidate-controlled committee could receive directly from people, and whether the ability of party committees to support candidate campaigns could adjust. To ensure that there are very few ways one can defeat these restrictions, strict restrictions on the movement of funds from PACs among political candidates’ campaign spending and parties were enforced.

One alternative to reform involves moving to a less expensive method. Under this approach, government payments are made available to candidates according to a set of conditions. This method would offer money to aspiring candidates who must refuse other donations or contribute towards costs of campaign spending that surpass a determined amount. This leads to a smaller reliance on wealthy donors. However, this no longer proposes negativity on corruption risk.

5. Conclusion

There are many private and often controversial interests behind square proposal of the finance of the election, and yet it is hard to foster the election system of totally preferential. This paper aims at sparking the advance of reform of the whole finance campaign of political career. But it is also of the opinion that the principles considered here and shown in one possible consequence should help to decry many of the special proposals preferred. The campaign finance is the politics and economics topics have motivated this paper, and the discussion it includes. It is mainly a political economic analysis of the voters, not by choosing the candidates, but by the candidates; clearly, however, the two things happen quickly.

There are many suggestions and insinuations for campaign finance reform: extension of the individual and political party preserve quotas for all elective political offices; pro mary but partial public financing of a campaign; and the publishing of candid career expenses. Which of these arenas will give the right answers to the problem put forward to those who search for political campaign finance reform? There are three strong hopes of the importance of campaigning understanding over the fence about proposed controlling legislation: Political career measurement is practical, in terms of incomplete monetary and statistical model, only to the extent that one posits the existence of serious voting.