Fighting Corruption in America and Abroad (original) (raw)

Campaign Contributions and Corruption: Comments on Strauss and Cain

University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1995

A decade ago, I concluded an article on political bribery with the thought that corruption is an" 'essentially contested concept,' that is, a concept containing a descriptive core on which users of the concept can agree roughly, but so unbounded and so intertwined with controversial normative ideas that general agreement on the features of the concept is impossible." 1 I went on: I do not believe, however, that we should provide our political scientists and theorists with such a convenient escape hatch just yet. Even if the problem of political bribery will not be solved in the end, there is value in the attempt. We need to think more about the concrete situations in which actors in our political system characteristically find themselves, and what we reasonably can ask of them in order to have the kind of system and the kind of results we would like. Intermediate political theory will no more solve our problems than other varieties of political theory, but it may help us disagree more intelligently. 2 In the present Symposium, Professors David A. Strauss and Bruce E. Cain-both scholars of the first rank-take up the challenge, by theorizing about whether it is corrupt for elected officials and pressure groups to exchange favorable official actions, such as legislative votes, for campaign contributions. 3 The fact

Political Corruption in America

The American states provide a useful arena for testing models of the causes and consequences of political corruption. Substantial variation appears in the two frequently-used measures of corruption, (a) twentyfive years of data on state-by-state rates of corruption convictions from the U.S. Department of Justice and (b) a cross-sectional survey of statehouse journalists' perceptions of statewide corruption. We argue that current models of causes of corruption in the states, however measured, are misspecified

Campaign Contribution Limits and Corruption: Evidence from the 50 states

Since the 1970s, the U.S. Supreme Court has frustrated efforts at campaign finance reform by maintaining that nearly all limits on political spending violate the first amendment's protection of free speech. In its 1976 Buckley v. Valeo decision, the Court laid out only two justifications for limiting political speech in the form of campaign donations: To prevent corruption or the appearance of corruption. But do campaign finance limits actually prevent corruption or its appearance? Using state-level data from 1990-2012 on contribution limits, corruption arrests, and media mentions of corruption, this paper employs a linear panel regression and a difference-indifferences analysis to test whether campaign contribution limits are associated with lower levels of corruption convictions or media mentions of corruption. These methods find no relationship between the presence or level of campaign finance laws and quid pro quo corruption. As current challenges to contribution limits wind their way through federal courts, the answer to this question will inform the Supreme Court's decision to uphold or strike down remaining limits on political campaign contributions.

Dollars and Sense: Campaign Finance Reform for the 21st Century

2019

MS. CRAIG: Good morning, everyone. Thank you very much for being here today. My name is Kristine Craig, and I'm the executive editor of the Journal of Legislation. I would like to begin with some introductions for our speakers. First we have Professor Ciara Torres-Spelliscy on the right. Professor Torres-Spelliscy teaches at Stetson on election law, corporate governance, business entities, and constitutional law. Her academic work has appeared in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy and the Duke Journal of Constitutional Law and Policy. She has also written pieces for The New York Times, The Economist, and Forbes Magazine. She has testified before Congress on campaign finance reform and has spoken at 31 universities on topics around the country. Next we have Professor Nicholas Stephanopoulos. Professor Stephanopoulos teaches and researches at the University of Chicago on a variety of areas within election law, constitutional law, and comparative law, in addition to publishing in academic journals such as the Harvard Law Review, Standard Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review, and the Yale Law Journal. He has written for publications such as The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune. He's also been involved in a variety of recent litigation efforts, including his work on the efficiency gap for the first successful partisan gerrymandering lawsuit in more than 30 years.

Political contributions and corruption in the United States

Journal of Economic Policy Reform , 2017

The empirical evidence presented in this study indicates that political contributions and corruption are complements, rather than substitutes. Based on panel data for seven election cycles, regression results show that in the United States, political contributions and federal corruption convictions are positively correlated. Accordingly, we propose an alternative explanation for the relationship between political contributions and corruption: two components of a comprehensive strategy for rent-seeking. As long-term investments, political contributions influence legislators to change the rules of the game; as short-term investments, corruption influences public officials to sidestep the existing rules, in order to maximize the rent collected.

On Constructing A Corruption Principle: The Importance of History and Theory In Practice

Law Culture And Humanities, 2021

Citizens United has stimulated a cottage industry of legal scholarship on corruption. A prominent stream of this literature is self-consciously atheoretical and suggests that the current state of corruption jurisprudence suffers from a misconceived reliance on liberal political theories and a rejection of the public good. We argue that it is impossible to understand specific acts of corruption without a political theory explaining why such actions are wrong. We show that the current jurisprudence relies on a mistaken intellectual history of the public good and a political theory of American constitutionalism that commodifies citizenship and treats political participation as a market good. Pace Teachout, we cannot draw the bright lines many legal scholars desire without a better political theory of the primary goods we want to protect.

The Deep Patterns of Campaign Finance Law

Why has American campaign finance law long suffered from doctrinal confusion and sparked bitter ideological conflict? This Article demonstrates that these attributes are rooted in a judicial dispute over the cognitive and social characteristics of central actors in elections. The Article unpacks the foundations of campaign finance law through a multi-tiered analysis of case texts. It first explicates the doctrinal deficiencies that riddle the Supreme Court's campaign finance jurisprudence. These flaws reflect the Court's clumsy engagement with democratic theory, which has been an unrecognized driver of campaign finance law and the wellspring of the partisan dispute. Conservatives assert that the pillar of democracy is free participation in the marketplace of information, and subsequently reject restriction of campaign financing even when advanced in the name of anticorruption. Conversely, liberals perceive democracy as vulnerable to systemic corruption from plutocratic influences and thus endorse regulatory oversight of campaign spending. The latter half of the Article excavates the origins of this conflict: the factions adopt divergent positions on the cognitive and social attributes of political actors (voters, candidates, donors, and public officials). As these positions inform the factions' theories of democracy, the campaign finance quagmire can be traced to political and psychological assumptions present in the cases. Progress in campaign finance law demands revision of the relationship between these assumptions and contemporary electoral realities.