The Price of Everything - Eduardo Porter [75]
Mark Hanna, the nineteenth-century Republican kingmaker and senator from Ohio, famously said: “There are two things that are important in politics. The first is money, and I can’t remember what the second one is.” More than a century later, despite many laws passed to reduce the influence of money in politics, in 2008, the campaign of Barack Obama spent a record $730 million—mostly in campaign ads—to win the presidency. That amounts to almost $10.50 for each of the voters who supported him at the polls. And Republican John McCain spent only about $5.60 for each one of his.
This might not seem too different from the price of voters in rural São Tomé and Príncipe. But the direct comparison is misleading. Many of Obama’s voters would have voted for him for free. The cost of convincing the uncommitted was much higher. A study of elections to the House of Representatives from 1972 through 1990 found that an additional $100,000 worth of campaign spending, in 1990 dollars, increased an incumbent’s share of the vote by only a tenth of a percentage point, on average. Challengers, who were less known and benefited more from campaign exposure, could buy 0.3 percent of the total vote for this amount. Correcting for inflation, this would mean that in the 2008 House election, the price of gaining an additional vote was about $212 for a challenger and $640 for an incumbent.
SUPPORTERS OF PRIVATE financing of political campaigns claim the purchase of political influence in the United States is very different from buying votes. Politicians use money to provide voters with information needed to reach a decision. TV ads are meant to convince voters that a candidate is the best and most viable—or that her rival is unworthy. If it looks as if the candidate with the most money always wins, it’s because good candidates are good at drawing campaign contributions. And if politicians vote the way their financial donors would want them to, it’s because they agree with them anyway.
This defense doesn’t fit reality, unfortunately. American campaign strategists deploy sophisticated marketing techniques rather than cold cash. They stroke voters’ biases rather than pay them. They seduce rather than buy. But their objective too is to get as many voters as possible to ignore their self-interest and vote for them. I admit that governance in the United States is better than in São Tomé and Príncipe. There are more institutional checks on power. Despite occasional bursts of antigovernment vitriol, government is still considered mostly a legitimate institution.
By contrast, vote buying in São Tomé and Príncipe delegitimizes democracy in the eyes of voters. Politicians who pay for a vote won’t feel constrained by policy commitments. Voters who took politicians’ cash won’t waste time keeping an eye on the quality of governance. Social scientists who have studied political institutions in the developing world argue that the ability of the rich to buy the votes of the poor contributes to poor countries’ unshakable poverty, hindering redistributive policies. São Tomé and Príncipe has had already two coups since its first free elections in 1991. It is in 111th place out of 180 in Transparency International’s corruption perceptions index—alongside kleptocracies such as Egypt and Indonesia.
But both political cultures rely on the purchasing of power. The key differences are the way power is bought and its price. In the United States votes are much more expensive. In a way, the difference between the forms of payment for elections in the United States and São Tomé and Príncipe and replicates the difference between corruption and its rich cousin, lobbying. Big firms in rich countries prefer lobbying—the use of money to persuade politicians to change the law—because it has more permanent effects. But