| Chapter 1: | Democracy without Politics? Hidden Costs of Corruption and Reform in America |
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on large contributions would enable smaller donors to participate more effectively—and to publicize funding, trusting, again, that wrongdoers would be punished at the polls. The resulting political marketplace, we were told, would be less corrupt and would produce more accountable governments and better public policy. How much corruption FECA prevented—if any—is impossible to know. So is whether policy more closely reflects the public will than it would have without the legislation, although it is fair to say that general indications are not particularly encouraging.
What FECA did best, however, was to heap added advantages upon already-strong congressional incumbents: contribution ceilings make it hard for challengers to compensate for their generally weaker name recognition, while rewarding the efforts of incumbents to build up extensive funding networks over time. Disclosure of contributions discourages donors from giving to challengers, and the absence of subsidies for congressional races means that many challengers are starved for funds from the start—or, equally discouraging, that the most effective challengers are likely to be wealthy individuals who can spend their own money. Challengers became even less likely to win, and thus to attract funds, while contributors were drawn to incumbents, who became even more attractive targets for donations because they were more likely to win.
The Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (BCRA), enacted after years of complaint about the political world FECA helped create, if anything makes matters worse. By doing away with so-called “soft money” and moving to an all-disclosure hard-money regime, incumbents (who have always found hard money easier to raise than do their challengers) are further strengthened while possible contributors to challengers—understandably loathe to antagonize entrenched incumbents—have another reason to keep their checkbooks in their pockets. Limitations upon “issue ads,” ostensibly imposed to elevate the negative tone of campaigns, restrict broadcast spending to purchases by campaigns themselves after certain deadlines, in the process discouraging a form of communication more often used to attack incumbents than challengers (these restrictions have drawn a number of legal challenges in court). And while