Inside Campaign Finance: Myths and Realities.

• Author: Jackson, Brooks

Inside Campaign Finance: Myths and Realities. Frank J. Sorauf. Yale, $27.50. Sorauf's latest book shows once again how little social science can teach us about how to revive our paralyzed, money-driven political system. Like an anthropologist collecting recipes from a tribe of cannibals, Sorauf studies and describes but doesn't condemn. The title itself is a bit of false advertising. Sorauf writes not from inside Washington's money machine but from his academic outpost at the University of Minnesota.

Despite all that has happened--the Charles Keating affair, the disgrace of Jim Wright, the return of the $100,000 fat-cat contributor to presidential campaigns, the collapse of electoral competition in the House--Sorauf's views remain pretty much what they were in 1988 when he published his very thorough textbook, Money in American Elections. Like most academics, he remains less than convinced that campaign money influences public policy to any alarming degree and is skeptical of all wrong-headed or doomed to disappointment.

This is not to say that political science is entirely irrelevant on this subject. It teaches a useful lesson about the effect of spending on elections, a lesson that the news media and would-be reformers would do well to absorb. The fact is that the more an incumbent spends, the less like he or she is to win. Incumbents spend more when they are in trouble, but the spending does little to change voters' minds. Challengers, on the other hand, always lose when they spend too little to publicize their name and campaign message. The political scientists' numbers teach us that the spending-limit proposals favored by Common Cause and congressional Democrats are based on a false premise. There is not "too much" being spent on elections; there is too little being raised and spent by challengers. Spending limits could hurt. Sorauf says, "The harm to challengers will increase the lower the spending limits are set."

But while political scientists are successful in linking spending and election results, they fail when they attempt to measure the effect of money on the hearts and minds of lawmakers. The latter is more properly the realm of the psychologist or, in extreme cases, the criminologist. A few years ago Sorauf siad, "There simply are no data . . . that would support the popular assertions about the 'buying' of the Congress." Although his view hasn't changed much, he does grudgingly concede that academic research on political...