People worry about campaign finance, and reasonably so. There’s something unsettling about millions of dollars being shuffled around during political campaigns, especially when the process is so opaque to the public.
What really bothers me, though, is the opportunity cost – I’ve taken an economics class too, Phil – involved with these campaign donations. In the 2014 midterm elections, Senate and House candidates accrued $1,648,471,891 in donations. That’s over one billion dollars that could have gone towards public school funding, food programs or some other charitable program to benefit Americans!
Some would argue that donating to a campaign is an indirect way to help America, though – that when you make a donation, you sponsor someone who you think will make positive changes to the national agenda. Phil seems to view this as part of the motivation for unions and other organizational donors. His article last week suggested that these groups, which he believes lean Democratic, donate because they believe that their money can make a difference.
Well, not only is Phil incorrect in his conviction that unions and other campaign contributors have an unfair influence on policy setting, but he also painted a flawed partisan picture.
As Frank R. Baumgartner, Jeffrey M. Berry, Marie Hojnacki, David C. Kimball and Beth L. Leech point out in their book Lobbying and Policy Change: Who Wins, Who Loses, and Why, the wealthy and those donating to political campaigns often do not see their desired results in Washington. The authors, after completing an in-depth, long-term study over the Clinton and Bush presidencies, concluded that 60 percent of recent lobbying efforts have failed because Washington favors a system of the status quo. In short, although some members of the political elite – like Tom Steyer, as Phil mentioned – might have high hopes for the effects of their campaign dollars, because of the bureaucracy and separate but shared powers system of the American government, campaign donations will only maintain current politics rather than instigate sweeping changes.
Furthermore, to address the specific issue of unions that Phil latched onto – unions make up one of the smallest portions of the interest-group community. In the aforementioned study, the authors created a sample group of 1,244 lobbyists representative of the real-life interest-group community. Of these lobbyists, only six percent reported to unions. Therefore, while I won’t challenge Phil’s findings in salary differences between union workers and government employees who do not belong to public sector unions, I will challenge his suggestion that this disparity can be attributed to lobbying and campaign finance.
Because in reality, unions might receive abundant media attention, but they do not gain much political sway. Phil’s suggestion that the political contributions of unions lead to increased influence and therefore higher salaries is thereby impractical. He says that a Bay Area Rapid Transit worker earns more than a congressional staffer. This might be true, but perhaps it is because BART functions thanks to a combination of tax revenue and business revenue (when people buy tickets) rather than Congress, which works on a pre-set budget from the national government. Phil’s argument lacks perspective and research.
Lastly, Phil’s article last week deceived readers in another regard. He wrote that Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg, two Democratic-leaning moguls, were the top individual donors to the 2014 mid-term election campaigns. This is true -– I took his suggestion and went on opensecrets.org – but it is also true that overall, Republican House and Senate candidates received more money in campaign contributions than Democrats did, a fact that Phil left out. While Democrats in the House worked with $450,776,626 in donations, Republicans had $585,606,851. In the Senate, Democrats saw $285,218,602, but G.O.P. candidates raised $315,898,295. Thus, two of the top campaign donations came from Democrats, yes, but they were joined on the list of top contributors by many Republicans, and in total, the Republicans outspent the Democrats on political campaigns.
In conclusion, neither party is innocent (although members of the G.O.P. do seem to have a higher flow of cash than do the Dems), but that is not really what matters. As I have noted in this article, and many political scientists have stated, campaign contributions do not have much influence.
A better approach to changing government might be to do so incrementally. That could mean starting a grassroots campaign to change a specific government policy, like water usage to reference Phil’s and my debate on the drought a few weeks ago, or it could mean that constituents start pressuring their representatives to take a stronger stand on issues currently facing Congress. Whatever the most effective path to alter policy setting may be, it certainly does not involve donating large blocks of money to political candidates, so both parties should lay off there.
