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Issue Advocacy and the Integrity of the Political Process Jonathan S. Krasno and Frank Sorauf Jonathan S. Krasno is a visiting fellow at the Institute for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University. Frank Sorauf is a Regents’ emeritus professor of political science at the University of Minnesota. Both served as expert witnesses for the defense and are experts on public opinion, political parties, and campaign finance. Their coauthored report reviews the academic empirical data on political party and interest group activity to refute the claim that soft money has had a significant effect in building stronger party organizations. In the section excerpted here, Krasno and Sorauf discuss the effect of issue advocacy advertising on the integrity of the political system. They note that the structure of the campaign finance system and the interests of the actors within it make issue advocacy an attractive option for those seeking to influence public officials. In their view, the rise of candidate-specific issue advertising has made a “mockery” of the restrictions on campaign funding under the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) and thus increases the risk of corruption. They specifically highlight the lack of disclosure of issue advocacy sponsors and sources of funding, since disclosure is widely regarded as an essential safeguard against corruption. Although they do not cite specific examples of corporate influence through issue advocacy, they conclude that issue advocacy advertising undermines the integrity of the electoral process and may have a corruptive effect by influencing policymakers to grant favors and access to those who sponsor such efforts. Defining Corruption In our earlier discussion of soft money we argued that corruption encompassed bribery, undue influence, and the more extreme forms of privileged access. We stand by that definition here. The use of candidate-oriented issue ads for electioneering by an array of established interest groups, freshly minted “organizations,” and parties in the last several election cycles has also created a broader set of problems about elections that we will address in this subsection. Our decision to place this discussion here is inspired in part by the Supreme Court’s earlier concern for the “integrity of the electoral process,” the controlling interest in campaign finance and related jurisprudence before Buckley.1 Indeed, by previous standards—and 189 04 1583-8 part2a 3/25/03 12:01 PM Page 189 from our own perspective as long-time students of elections—we regard the recent use of issue ads as inimical to the integrity of the electoral system and, in that respect, corrupting. We would judge the health of the electoral system by a few simple criteria . The first is choice: elections should offer voters an alternative between two or more candidates with a reasonable chance of winning. As desirable as it would be for voters to like their choices, it is even more essential that more than one of the names on their ballot have some possibility of election. This suspense, of course, raises the stakes of voting for citizens and spurs turnout. It also provides the chief means for popular control of elected officials; legislators for whom defeat is unthinkable have much less incentive to heed or serve their constituents than officials whose careers are even slightly precarious. Obviously, practical considerations like the underlying partisanship of many jurisdictions and the popularity of many incumbents shrink the odds of truly competitive elections in most states and districts. Even taking these considerations into account, however, the number of contested races, particularly for the House of Representatives, has sunk to dangerously low levels: as of August 6, 2002, nonpartisan observers believed that just 39 House districts out of 435 were “in play” in the 2002 elections, a phenomenally small number in a redistricting year and one that left more than 90 percent of Americans living in districts written off that November.2 Second, we would point to the importance of citizen participation. Voting is the main form of participation, but not the only one. Citizens may also participate in politics by becoming candidates for office, an enormous but vital commitment. Scholars are largely agreed that the difficulty in recruiting candidates is a principal reason for the lack of competition in elections.3 We should also not forget another group of participants, the shrinking percentage of Americans who volunteer on election campaigns or partisan endeavors.4 These activists have always been a small minority of the population, but their energy and commitment are vitally important to the system. On a practical level, we know that...

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