Inside the Campaign Finance Battle: Court Testimony on the New Reforms

Why Soft Money Has Not Strengthened Parties

Why Soft Money Has Not Strengthened Parties 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. Krasno and Sorauf served as expert witnesses for the defense and are experts on public opinion, political parties, and campaign finance. In their review of the academic empirical data on political party and interest group activity, Krasno and Sorauf refute the claim that soft money has had a significant effect in building stronger party organizations. They note that trends in voter turnout, levels of party competition, and party identification do not support the thesis that parties have become stronger in recent decades. They describe how the diverse interests of candidates and parties work against the development of broadly based party organizations and argue that parties have focused their soft-money resources on advertising in a relatively small number of races, instead of devoting these funds to the type of activities that might provide a lasting or positive impact on state and local party organizations. Krasno and Sorauf also argue that the reform act’s ban on soft money will not significantly hinder party efforts to mobilize voters and thus depress voter turnout. They present a detailed analysis of party soft-money expenditures to make the case that only a relatively small proportion of soft-money spending is devoted to voter mobilization. Furthermore, they note, the higher contribution limits included in the reform act will provide adequate resources for party building in the future and may actually work to the benefit of state and local party committees. Building Parties with Soft Money There is no need to speculate about the immediate impact of a soft-money ban on parties since there is a long record of soft-money receipts and expenditures dating back a decade and longer.1 The two national committees and the congressional campaign committees raised nearly $1.2 billion in soft money from 1991 to 2000, including more than $700 million in the 1997–98 and 1999–2000 election cycles.2 Of this sum, more than $500 million was transferred to state parties during this period, in addition to the $235 million of hard money that the national committees sent 49 02 1583-8 part1a 3/25/03 12:00 PM Page 49 to the states.3 We evaluate the impact of these resources on parties by referring back to the various roles they play in our political system. To begin, there is no evidence that these financial resources have played any appreciable role in the historic level of party loyalty achieved within Congress over the last decade. Leaders on all sides have gone to great pains to confirm their willingness to steer financial support to party colleagues regardless of their voting records, and there is no reason to doubt them. There is anecdotal evidence of some financial strong-arming in the states as party leaders in legislatures with highly centralized systems like New York’s or California’s have reputedly used their control of electoral resources to reward and punish legislators according to their support of the leadership. In Congress, however, this has not been the case. This conclusion does not contradict our earlier argument about the corruptive potential of soft money, for the behaviors in each situation are fundamentally different. The use of soft money to enforce party discipline involves leaders using their control of campaign resources as leverage on the entire caucus on a broad swath of roll call votes important to the leaders. Our argument about corruption, on the other hand, involves the donors’ use of parties as conduits to route soft money to legislators in return for a wide variety of actions on a relatively narrow set of issues. At first glance, the effect of soft money on the numbers of Americans voting and on electoral competition seems rather unimpressive. Voter turnout, already low, continued its slow decline in the 1990s with the exception of 2000, when a slightly greater percentage of Americans cast ballots than had four years earlier. Even so, voter turnout at the end of the 1990s was actually slightly lower than it had been at the start.4 Similarly, electoral competition returned to historically low levels as soft-money receipts rose. This was particularly true for the House of Representatives, the set of elections in which the lack of competition has been of...