Horse-trading is inherently capitalist – the power of corporations and lobbyists influence every congressional vote

The most critical effect of money is not its outsize influence on a particular politician. In fact, the real issue is that money enables the wealthy to dominate the circulation of political ideas and policies, particularly when it comes to shaping the economic dimension of politics. This form of domination does include campaign donations. But what’s really at stake is that money structures a political agenda that then limits the range of voices, attention to issues, and policy options in the political system. Such structuring of the very terms of debate is manifested less in quid pro quo transactions—Person A paying Politician B to act in the interest of Person A—than in the power of gatekeeping. And gatekeeping affects everything: the candidates who run for office, how politicians prioritize problems, and the evidence used to frame and address public policies.1

This gatekeeping power is not only employed for securing economic outcomes. There is a second dimension of power, which is often ignored because it involves internal factional battles within the political parties. Wealthy partisans engage in fights over the soul of their respective political parties. Sometimes dubbed the culture wars, these are often conflicts related to morality and lifestyle differences. Leverage comes in the form of vital resources—money and activist volunteers—which make the parties highly dependent on these wealthy partisans. Consequently, money also shapes the social dimension of public policies.

To be sure, the social and economic dimensions are intimately related, most especially in the domain of civil rights. But the heavy emphasis on the social and symbolic aspects of politics tends to divert politicians from working on bread-and-butter issues—health care, education, and social security—that concern most citizens. And because party representatives feel compelled by wealthy activists to take relatively extreme positions on issues like guns, abortion, and immigration, the parties become more polarized and less capable of finding negotiated solutions to other problems. Money, in this sense, doesn’t just buy influence; instead, it exacerbates and intensifies political polarization and democratic strife.

When both of these moneyed distortions—economic and social—come together, they often result in stasis and gridlock, despite substantial consensus among Americans around the need for new policies and for government action.2 As such, even if one prefers limited government, the power of wealth undermines the basic ideals of representative government. In acting as a gatekeeper to limit who can shape politics, money makes the system of democracy and government much less responsive to the aspirations and interests of voters.

CAMPAIGN FINANCE

Let’s begin with distortions introduced by campaign contributions. The public understandably fears that political donors buy off politicians. Research shows that this kind of raw transaction is not pervasive, at least not in the sense that politicians change votes for money. The more likely scenario is that donors give to politicians who champion their economic interests.

This means that money matters in an entirely different way from how it is traditionally understood. In the first instance, money in politics is effectively purchasing the status quo, because economic interests—including corporations and high-net-worth individuals—devise strategies to funnel campaign resources overwhelmingly in favor of incumbents. By receiving contributions from business-related political action committees PACs, incumbents accumulate war chests to scare off high-quality challengers. With fewer competitors, the circulation of new policy ideas and alternative political goals are suppressed.

In the second instance, business interests secure the status quo by buying the time of politicians to promote or thwart legislation that threatens donor interests. This behavior begins well before any vote. Politicians who receive money from particular interests may ration their legislative efforts—time, staff, and political capital—in ways that indirectly benefit the advancement or death of a bill.3 In other words, money buys motivation, a scarce and vital resource from elected officials, which often leads to policy success.

Campaign finance is also related to the second, social dimension of power. Politicians rely heavily on political spending from a narrow set of partisan-aligned interest groups and wealthy individuals that feel passionately about issues, especially regarding guns, abortion, religion, and immigration. To win the party nomination, candidates need the financial support of activist donors and partisan interest groups. Unless a potential candidate hews to positions on certain social issues, they will have a hard time getting the resources to run for office.

And, once in office, politicians will be reluctant to compromise, fearing that these militants will champion a challenger in the primary. In this way, advocacy donors shape the direction of the party by doing what party bosses used to do: they gatekeep who runs for office and who stays in.

Some point to the rise of small donors as a counterweight to the power of large donors. Certainly, the internet has reduced the transaction costs of mobilizing small donors who are not inside players in Washington. Research indicates, however, that small donors are as polarizing as large donors and that they are not necessarily representative of rank-and-file partisans in other ways, being older, wealthier, and whiter.

LOBBYING AND THINK TANKS

Money distorts the policymaking process more directly through lobbying and think tanks, most especially on the economic dimension. In 2018, lobbying expenditures in the US totaled $3.4 billion, nearly five times the amount that interest groups contributed to campaigns.4 Not surprisingly, business interests dominate lobbying, spending 85 percent of the total. While such groups do not always win, the fact that they typically seek the status quo gives them a built-in advantage since, in this democratic system, there are multiple veto points at which even marginal changes are easily halted.

The power of lobbying does not just amount to tawdry transactions over steak and martinis. What matters critically is the information that lobbyists provide to elected officials.5 Legislators are busy, they are generalists, and they have limited staff resources, so they tend to rely on information provided by lobbyists to inform their policymaking. By furnishing packets of policy evidence and forging coalitions, the lobbyist makes a lawmaker’s life easier. This “legislative subsidy” increases the likelihood that the legislator will focus on the policy goals of the lobbyist rather than the interests of actual constituents. Since resources to hire lobbyists are not distributed evenly throughout the polity, policies gets distorted toward those with the money to hire such advocates.

Well-resourced lobbyists have additional advantages. They glean their policy proposals from a host of think tanks supported financially by allied interest groups and wealthy individual donors. In the US, the number of think tanks has mushroomed to roughly two thousand across a range of issue areas. The purpose of many think tanks is not to apply expertise to address problems, but rather to package policy ideas that align with political goals.