• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

5,000 0 5,000

Donoghue, Barrett & Singal

0 5,000 5,000

Synergy PAC

5,000 0 5,000

United Parcel Service 5,000 0 5,000

What does this list say?

Many people experience this sort of question the way they’d experience the formalities of an eighteenth-century ball: eager to avoid embarrassment, because they believe there must be insight or wisdom here. But put your humility aside for a second: What are these data telling us? We see contributions from employees of UPS. But we also see contributions from the Teamsters. We can say unions support the congressman. But we can also wonder why the lawyers do. The sheer volume seems to scream, “There’s something here to see!” But the more we look, the less we understand. The more we study, the more questions get raised.

There’s a fundamental difference between the EPA sticker and the product of the FEC: the one conveys information in a usable manner; the other conveys facts that are often likely to confuse. The one helps us make decisions; the other leaves us more uncertain. The one says something; the other cannot. In an economy in which members of Congress must raise millions to keep their jobs, a perfect record of those contributions tells us both too little and too much. Too much because we’re as likely to jump from some stray fact to a conclusion it can’t support (“He took money from the banks; he must be bought by the banks”). Too little because if the real action is in the relationship between the funders and the lobbyists, then the mere fact of a contribution doesn’t reveal that real action. A donation of $2,500 given by an executive on his own, outside of a relationship with a lobbyist, means something completely different from $2,500 given by an executive as part of a campaign directed by a lobbyist to secure support for a congressman just as he’s considering what to do about a particular bill.

This incompleteness doesn’t mean that transparency rules should be abolished. Of course they should not. Having a record of contributions is critically important to avoiding more grotesque forms of corruption. And no doubt, given the astonishing drop in disclosure by “independent” entities participating in political campaigns, Congress should certainly work quickly to close the disclosure gap. (In 2004, 97.9 percent of groups making electioneering communications disclosed their donors; in 2010, 34 percent did.)3

But a detailed record of contributions in a system that depends fundamentally upon an endless stream of contributions will not on its own produce the reform we need. It will not secure congressional independence.

For, perversely, the system simply normalizes dependence rather than enabling independence. There’s no shame in the dance. There’s no embarrassment from being on the list. There is instead an endless stream of “gotcha” journalism linking a decision to a contributor, with almost no integrity on either side. That “gotcha” in turn feeds the already profound cynicism that Americans have. Like snippets of flirtation between a significant other and someone else, they fuel emotion, not understanding. Passion, not truth.

And then there’s another, more fundamental problem with relying upon transparency alone: transparency assumes that the influence in the system comes with the gift. That if you want to know how much Company X influenced Congressman Y, you need only look at the contributions of X to Y (by employees of X, or through independent expenditures of X to support Y).

But as economists Marcos Chamon and Ethan Kaplan argued in a paper titled “The Iceberg Theory of Campaign Contributions,” the influence from campaign contributions may well be independent of the amount actually spent. Instead, the influence on any particular candidate, they maintain, could also depend on the credible threat of expenditures to benefit the candidate’s opponent.4

The effect on the incentives of a candidate, for example, of a $10,000 contribution to the candidate could be the equivalent to the effect on incentives from a $2,000 contribution to that same candidate,