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By Root 991 0

attract “the People”? It is reasonable to believe there is a gap between “the funders” and “the People,” if only because in the most critical cases, the vast majority of contributions to a congressional campaign are not even from “the voters” in that district. At one point, Representative John Murtha (D-Pa.; 1973–2010) had raised over $200,000, with only $1,000 coming from his district.19 OpenSecrets.org reports that 67 percent of John Kerry’s contributions in his 2008 reelection to the Senate came from out-of-state donors. His Republican opponent received 73 percent of his funding from outside Massachusetts.20 MapLight reports that between January 2007 and March 2010, 79 percent of contributions to California state legislators came from out-of-district contributors.

Even if you ignore this “out-of-district” effect, it is clear “the funders” are not “the People.” As Professor Spencer Overton puts it, “Individuals with family incomes over $100,000 represented 11% of the population in 2004, cast 14.9% of the votes and were responsible for approximately 80% of the political contributions over $200.”21 Only 10 percent of American citizens give to political campaigns; less than 0.5 percent are responsible for the majority collected from individuals.22

This gap between contributors and voters means that responsiveness to one is not necessarily responsiveness to the other. Or, again, the sort of thing you need to do to make contributors happy is not the sort of thing you need to do to make voters happy.

And so, once again: while it might not convince a political science department, in my view, we have enough to say that this competing dependency upon “the funders” is also a conflicting dependency with “the People.” Or that it is, in other words, an instance of dependence corruption.

This conception of dependence corruption helps make sense of the important distinction suggested by J. J. Wallis between what he calls “venal corruption” and “systematic corruption.”23

Venal corruption, as Wallis puts it, is “the pursuit of private economic interests through the political process. [It] occurs when economics corrupts politics.”24 Systematic corruption is in a sense the opposite, “[m]anipulating the economic for political ends…. [It] occurs when politics corrupts economics.”25 Or, again:

In polities plagued with systematic corruption, a group of politicians deliberately create rents by limiting entry into valuable economic activities, through grants of monopoly, restrictive corporate charters, tariffs, quotas, regulations, and the like. These rents bind the interests of the recipients to the politicians who create the rents. The purpose is to build a coalition that can dominate the government.26

With both forms of corruption, one could focus upon the bad souls effecting the corruption, or upon the institutions that make it possible.

The rhetoric of the Progressives focused upon “bad men rather than on bad institutions.”27 But their remedy was structural changes that would make it “more difficult for the few, and easier for the many, to control.”28 The common thread in the enormously diverse movement from Teddy Roosevelt to Louis Brandeis was a focus upon corruption. The common remedies for this diverse movement were changes that would make government more responsive to a democratic will.29

For conservatives (and the Framers), the focus was on bad institutions that would encourage bad men. The remedy, in their view, to systematic corruption was to “[f]irst… eliminate… the pressure to create special corporate privileges by enacting constitutional provisions requiring legislatures to pass general incorporation laws [rather than special (and privileged) corporate charters]. [Likewise, to forbid] state and local investment in private corporations.”30 The intent was “to reduce the political manipulation of the economic system… by reducing the payoff to political machinations.”31

Throughout the literature exploring this dichotomy, however, there is an underdeveloped conception of responsibility with each conception of corruption.