The campaign finance architecture determines who pays for American democracy. What it has produced is a system in which the people who pay for elections have disproportionate influence over what elected officials do.
The Architecture After Citizens United
The campaign finance architecture that emerged from the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision — which held that the First Amendment prohibits restrictions on independent political expenditures by corporations and other organisations — is a system in which the formal limits on direct contributions to candidates coexist with effectively unlimited spending through the super PACs and dark money organisations that Citizens United enabled. The formal contribution limits remain: individuals are limited in the amounts they can contribute directly to candidates, parties, and PACs. The practical spending limits have been removed: through super PACs, which can raise and spend unlimited amounts on elections so long as they do not coordinate directly with candidates, and through the 501(c)(4) organisations that can engage in significant political activity without disclosing their donors.
The consequences of this architecture for democratic accountability are significant and empirically documented. Candidates, parties, and the super PACs that support them are increasingly dependent on the small share of extremely wealthy donors who provide the large contributions that fund the independent expenditure campaigns that often determine electoral outcomes. The legislative preferences of these donors — on tax policy, regulation, social spending, and other economic policy questions where wealthy donor preferences differ systematically from median voter preferences — receive more legislative attention than the preferences of the median voter whose support is formally the basis of the electoral mandate.
The campaign finance architecture is the money-in-democracy problem in institutional form. It produces a democratic system in which formal equality — one person, one vote — coexists with practical inequality in political influence that is proportionate to wealth. The governance consequence is a legislative system that is more responsive to the preferences of large donors than to the preferences of the median voter the system is formally designed to represent.
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