Small Change: Money, Political Parties, and Campaign Finance Reform.

• Author: Garrett, R. Sam

Small Change: Money, Political Parties, and Campaign Finance Reform

Raymond J. La Raja

Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008, 304 pp.

Ray La Raja has written one of the most provocative campaign finance books in recent memory. Small Change causes the reader to struggle with fundamental "truths" about money and politics, to revisit old questions, and to ask new ones. La Raja directly challenges prevailing scholarship--and popular wisdom--concerning the purposes and origins of campaign finance regulation and its effect on political parties. The dual focus on campaign finance and American political parties is arguably the book's greatest strength. (La Raja generally uses the term "regulation" broadly, although his focus is on major changes in law rather than on regulations, such as those issued by the Federal Election Commission. For expediency, this review also uses the term "regulation" to encompass both federal campaign finance law and agency regulations.)

In Small Change, La Raja contends that neither campaign finance regulation nor parties can be studied in isolation. Rather, he argues, the two are inextricably linked. For La Raja, a century of campaign finance regulation has shaped every aspect of political parties, particularly organizationally and financially. The relationship La Raja describes is, essentially, a symbiotic one: regulation shapes parties, and parties (especially factions within parties) both adapt to that regulation and try to change it to their advantage.

Small Change makes one primary argument: that campaign finance regulation has been the result of a competition for electoral resources among various factions within both the major national parties--not a Progressive political tradition rooted in anti-corruption and good-government sentiment, as most contemporary works imply. La Raja does not suggest that Progressive-style reform is disingenuous. Indeed, he recognizes that Progressivism, rooted in Mugwump politics of the late-1800s, emphasized regulation of parties and has been a driving force behind campaign finance regulation both before and after the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) was enacted, and amended primarily in the 1970s. La Raja does argue, however, that many explanations of the history of campaign finance regulation prematurely stop with--or simply accept--what he calls the "public interest perspective." La Raja also isn't satisfied with another prominent school of thought, the "rational...