Buying the Vote: A History of Campaign Finance Reform by Robert E. Mutch (review)

Buying the Vote examines the evolution of the financing of presidential elections, the adoption and impact of federal campaign-finance laws, and the Supreme Court’s campaign-finance cases. Its primary historical focus (seven of the book’s nine substantive chapters) is the era from the Gilded Age to Watergate. The modern campaign-finance system was born at the start of this period, as civil-service reform’s erosion of the spoils system, the emergence of big business corporations, and the growing cost of elections together led to a shift in the main sources of campaign funds from political insiders—candidates, politicians, party workers, and politically active businessmen—to wealthy outsiders interested in affecting the outcome of elections. The prominent role played by large donations from major financiers, industrialists, and their corporations, as revealed by journalistic accounts and federal and state investigations, led to a public outcry and enactment of the first federal campaign-finance laws, barring corporation donations and requiring disclosure in 1907, 1910, and 1911.

Closely examining newspaper articles and editorials, the extensive investigative reports undertaken by federal and state legislative committees, and the papers of leading Progressive Era reformers, Mutch finds the place of the corporation in American democracy was a central concern in this period. Challenging accounts that give greater weight to corporate wealth and power and the ability of officers and directors to misuse shareholder funds, Mutch contends that the move to ban corporate contributions reflected the conclusion “that corporations are not citizens and do not have the rights of citizens. This was a formal statement of democratic principle” (50). Although these laws were rarely enforced and often evaded, Mutch maintains that they were of great “symbolic” significance (186). Moreover, he finds that they actually had some impact on campaign-finance practices. Going through the reports of the many congressional committees that examined the financing of presidential elections from 1912 to 1968, he discovered that most national-party committees filed campaign reports and that after Congress enacted the disclosure law, the size of the average donation dropped from the Gilded Age heights. He “suggests” that among “political and economic elites,” there was “an informal consensus that supported disclosure and kept down the size of contributions” (119).

The final third of the book focuses on the post-Watergate era, especially on the parsing of the Supreme Court’s anti-reform decisions. As Mutch notes, the Court’s rulings that campaign-finance laws trigger First Amendment concern and that the promotion of political equality cannot justify spending limits mark the first time that opposition to reform was “based in political theory” rather than on short-term political or partisan self-interest (143). Mutch links the Court’s action to a new conservative concern with liberal attacks on big business. He is especially critical of the cases striking down corporate spending limits, in part because, in his view, they fail to come to grips with the early twentieth-century determination that corporations are not part of the democratic political community (186).

The writing about these points is more than a little tendentious. Mutch dismisses one opinion as “circumlocutory fog” (182), and he fails to recognize that even some liberal members of the Court have found that spending limits impinge on the dissemination of political speech (although they are more willing to uphold regulation on egalitarian grounds). The focus on corporations also misses the fact that many of the largest donations in the 2012 election came from wealthy individuals, and that most electorally active corporations are non-profit ideological entities, not business firms. Nonetheless, Mutch is surely correct that the Court’s decisions, rooted in a controversial legal theory, “have had a substantial effect on political reality” and have sharply narrowed the range of possible reforms (185).