Public opinion and campaign finance: reformers reality.

• Author: Primo, David M.

In the 2000 race for the presidency, Arizona senator John McCain promoted campaign finance reform as a partial remedy for widespread citizen cynicism toward politics. On the Democratic side, Al Gore promised in his acceptance speech for the party nomination that his first act as president would be to send campaign finance legislation to the Congress: "If you entrust me with the presidency, I will put our democracy back in your hands and get all the special interest money, all of it, out of our democracy by enacting campaign finance reform" (Gore 2000). The appeal of such proposals is easy to understand. In an era of public cynicism toward politics, new regulations promise new ways of doing business in Washington. The mass media cover campaign finance feverishly, with the slant that money is the root of all political evils, and treat calls for reform with little of their usual skepticism. Because reformers receive a free ride from the media and the public generally supports reform in the abstract, calls for change carry little political risk. (1)

Despite the public's overwhelming belief that money corrupts, significant campaign finance reform at the federal level has been elusive since the last major reforms in the 1970s. (The significance of the 2002 reforms remains to be seen.) The parallels to other issues are striking. If the public is asked about health care or social security reform, overwhelming majorities favor new regulations. Yet we observe only glacial movement on these fronts as well. Like many issues in American politics, they share four traits: issue complexity, multiple viable alternatives, fierce defense of the status quo, and division of public opinion on specific reform proposals. These are classic ingredients in a recipe for political stalemate, and only recently has that stalemate been broken.

Elites have passionate views on the issue, and each side claims that public sentiment supports its position. For instance, John McCain believes the public supported his efforts to enact new campaign finance regulations: "I believe that the country wants this reform. There is no doubt about the explosion of soft money. There is no doubt that it has gridlocked us here in Washington and the message of the last election is that Americans do not want that" (CNN 2001). Public opinion also figures into the campaign finance debate in another way. Advocates of new regulations on fund-raising argue that certain aspects of the system, such as soft money and issue advocacy, foster public cynicism and mistrust of American government. Americans have long lacked confidence in Congress and in the presidency in particular as well as in the federal government in general (Hibbing and Theiss-Morse 1995). If the advocates are right, new restrictions on campaign finance might counteract this general tendency in public opinion toward a mistrust of American government and public officials.

In this article, I review the public-opinion data and show that the public has favored reform, but it has been inconsistent in its preferences and has assigned campaign finance reform a low priority. I also show that trust in government is not linked to campaign spending. This absence of connection contradicts arguments that Americans will trust government more if the amount spent on campaigns drops following reform.

The Role of Public Opinion in a Republican System

In a republican democracy, there is a tension between legislators' representing the desires of their constituencies (the delegate model) and their voting in accordance with their conscience (the trustee or Burkean model). This balancing problem is complicated by imperfect preference aggregation and measurement error. Preference aggregation refers to the manner in which individual preferences are translated into a policy outcome. The last four decades of research in political science and economics have demonstrated that in general no "will of the people" exists. (2) For instance, a desirable property of an aggregation rule is transitivity: if policy A is preferred to policy B, and policy B is preferred to policy C, then policy A should be preferred to policy C. The most famous example of an intransitivity, leading to what is known as "cycling," is Condorcet's Paradox. Suppose three citizens have preferences for alternatives A, B, and C as follows. Citizen 1 prefers A to B to C. Citizen 2 prefers B to C to A. Citizen 3 prefers C to A to B. In pairwise majority-rule competition, A beats B, and B beats C, but also C beats A, thus violating the transitivity condition.

Second, even if a "will of the people" existed, how might we discover it? Possibilities include constituent mail, public-opinion polls, or town-hall meetings, all of which are imperfect. Constituent mail and town-hall meetings are unlikely to be representative of the district as a whole. Polls are plagued by nonresponses and by poorly worded questions. (3) Clearly, all means of capturing citizen preferences are imprecise, at best.

Supporters of a given policy tend to take a trustee perspective when it suits their needs and a delegate position when the public appears to support them. Similarly, public-opinion data tend to be dismissed as faulty when they hurt one's position and to be adduced as evidence for change when they support one's policy preference. Campaign finance is a particularly interesting case because here public opinion is tied intimately to the policy change. Reformers claim that cleaning up the system will restore faith in government. If such restoration is the goal of campaign finance reform, then using public-opinion data is the best way to ascertain whether reform is a worthwhile policy change. In other words, the public's views on campaign finance are ostensibly the reason for reform.

What the Public Thinks of Campaign Finance Reform

Answering a question of the form "What does the public think about campaign finance reform?" is a daunting task. Many polls on the topic have been conducted, with various wording and ordering of questions. Most polls show that the public wants to fix a "broken" system. Some polls even show significant support for limiting campaign expenditures, a clear violation of the First Amendment to the Constitution. If the public is so supportive of new regulations, why did a version of the McCain-Feingold bill and the Shays-Meehan bill--the Senate and House campaign finance reform proposals, respectively--take nearly seven years to achieve legislative success? (4)

One hypothesis that receives mixed support is that the public does not believe that reforms will change anything in Washington. In a 1997 Center for Responsive Politics (CRP) poll, (5) 62 percent agreed that laws can be effective in reducing the role of money in politics, whereas in an October 2000 Gallup poll, 64 percent agreed that campaign finance reform would do nothing to reduce the "power of special interests." (6) (The CRP is a nonpartisan group that examines the role of money in politics and has a reformist bent.) These answers are, to a large degree, a function of question wording, question placement, and other survey-design matters.

A more plausible hypothesis is that, outside the Washington Beltway, the public does not care about the issue, which allows opponents to kill proposed reforms with impunity. Consider the data. When asked by the CRP if reform should be a top or high priority, most Americans (60 percent) answered in the affirmative. Yet they also agreed that a number of other policy areas were more important. This evidence suggests that campaign finance is a priority only after more important issues have been dealt with. In fact, in poll after poll...