The Fallacy of Campaign Finance Reform (review)

Like other controversial political issues, the issue of campaign finance reform has become bitterly divided and partisan with a wide gulf separating reformers and deregulators. The opposing sides seldom agree on terminology, facts, or values, let alone how to interpret and evaluate those facts to make policy decisions. John Samples, director of the Cato Institute's Center for Representative Government, sets out to bridge that divide and test the assumptions and evidence of campaign finance reform proponents in The Fallacy of Campaign Finance Reform, but ultimately succeeds only in providing talking points for adherents to his position.

Samples's viewpoint is clear not only in the title of the book but also throughout its pages. Samples argues that "campaign finance reform is a delusion" (280) created by Democrats and other progressives to equalize political influence and balance wealth in all of society. Further, he reasons that regulations on campaign contributions are created by incumbent legislators to give themselves an electoral advantage and that these restrictions limit freedom of expression. These regulations, Samples writes, violate the First Amendment provision that Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech because donating money to a political candidate or organization is a form of expression. According to Samples, regulating money in politics is akin to regulating political speech: "Today no one should exercise his or her First Amendment right to freedom of speech without advice from counsel.… In the United States, speech is no longer very free in any sense of the word" (1).

Based on this self-described libertarian perspective, Samples challenges the arguments and evidence of campaign finance reform proponents. He examines several justifications of finance constraints including that such regulation reduces corruption in politics, improves our political culture and public sphere, brings greater equality to campaigns, and increases electoral competition. He argues that "we should assess existing or proposed restrictions on money in politics on their merits, which is to say, according to their logical coherence or empirical validity" (13). Based on his analysis, these justifications are "illusions."

In the opening two chapters, Samples characterizes campaign finance reform as a battle between two "visions of politics"; the Madisonian vision of the constitutional founders and the Progressive vision that has completely rejected the founders' ideals of liberty and has "sought to discredit the Constitution by reducing law to politics" (46) and "wholly denied the foundations of the First Amendment" (54). Samples aligns his position with the core values and ideology of the framers and constructs the philosophy of reformers as a straw man to criticize and attack. Although they correctly place the discussion of campaign finance reform in the larger theoretical and historical context, these two chapters unnecessarily and falsely bifurcate the issue into two opposing positions, while ignoring the various middle positions to which many lawmakers and citizens subscribe, including recent U.S. Supreme Court majorities as indicated in their decisions.

This book succeeds when Samples sticks to his mission of empirically testing the arguments of campaign finance reformers. In chapters 3 through 6, he challenges the claims and evidence of proponents, holding them up to the light and scrutinizing them from a libertarian perspective. Through citing and analyzing social science and historical research, Samples challenges many of the commonly held positions on campaign finance reform. Not surprisingly, Samples finds that these arguments are not supported with empirical evidence and that the available evidence supports his viewpoint. Scholars familiar with this research will recognize that the literature is often contradictory and far from conclusive. To his credit, Samples does present and address research that is not favorable to his argument and usually questions the studies on methodological grounds. But although Samples is quick to attack the methodology and conclusions of scholarship that runs contrary to his position, he often ignores the similar limitations of research supporting his viewpoint.

Samples concludes the book in the final three chapters by retelling the story of campaign finance reform in an attempt to correct its history, and he ends...