Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig launched his Web-based Change Congress campaign Thursday at a National Press Club event sponsored by the Sunlight Foundation as part of the pro-transparency non-profit's annual Sunshine Week. The goal of Change Congress, Lessig explained, is to fight the influence of money in politics by exacting pledges from candidates and lawmakers to personally eschew lobbyist and PAC money, as well as supporting a series of legislative reforms, and then using the distributed eyes of the Internet to ensure that they stick to their promises.

The first half of Lessig's remarks closely tracked the inaugural lecture on corruption he delivered at Stanford last year, after announcing that he would be abandoning the work on cyberlaw and free culture that had made him a geek superstar in order to study the ways money's influence distorts the political process. He detailed how, on an array of "easy questions" in areas ranging from copyright terms to dietary recommendations to climate change to military procurement, the interests of funders had driven a wedge between policy formation or academic inquiry and the overwhelming consensus of impartial experts. He also offered conservatives, who have often been skeptics of campaign finance reform, a rationale to share his concerns: "Why is government so big?" Lessig asked rhetorically. "Because congressmen must get elected." He claimed, for example, that legislators had been reluctant to establish a more deregulated telecommunications framework for the Internet in the 1990s because the looming threat of regulation kept campaign contributions rolling in from telecom firms.

This time, Lessig sketched his plan to attack the problem with Change-Congress.org, using a "three layer" strategy. First, the site would ask candidates and elected officials to make any or all of four pledges: To refuse contributions from lobbyists and political action committees, to support a ban on legislative "earmarks," to promote legislation that increases government transparency, and to support public financing of political campaigns. Candidates could then download badges for display on their websites indicating which planks of the Change Congress platform they have endorsed, a feature similar to the customizable intellectual property licenses produced by Creative Commons, which Lessig also helped to found. Second, by exploiting a variety of existing transparency resources online, Change Congress would create a wiki-like platform allowing users to track both the positions held by politicians on these four points and how well they live up to their stated views in practice. Finally, it would ask voters to make a parallel pledge to support candidates who adhere to the Change Congress platform.

Open-source principles

Though Lessig did not frame it in quite these terms, the project is a clear attempt to use distributed peer-production processes to overcome one of the fundamental political problems identified by public choice analysis, in much the same way open-source production allows for the creation of informational public goods that, on traditional economic models, would tend to be underproduced in the absence of government subsidy or artificial monopoly grants, such as copyrights or patents. The political equivalent of the public goods problem is what public choice theorists often describe as the problem of "concentrated benefits, diffuse costs". The problem arises when a poor policy produces a large benefit for a small number of actors, but distributes the costs (whether in the form of direct taxation or regulatory inefficiency) across the much larger general population. The beneficiaries have a powerful incentive to ally themselves and lobby for the policy in question, but the transaction costs of organizing and low individual burden on any one taxpayer or consumer mean ordinary citizens have little motivation to mobilize in opposition.

Open source can solve the public goods problem for software because digital networks and widespread computer ownership lower transaction costs and allow large projects to be broken into small enough pieces that individual coders are willing to lend a hand even when they can't directly internalize the marginal market value of their contributions. Change Congress attacks the parallel political problem in two ways. First, it bundles together many discrete bad policies under the aegis of a procedural reform. Lessig's favorite analogy here is to alcoholism: An alcohol problem leads to a variety of further personal, professional, and medical ills, none of which can be effectively dealt with until the alcoholic resolves to give up the bottle. But this approach also helps to aggregate the costs of those particular bad policies in the eyes of citizens, helping to overcome the incentive problem that results when each policy is considered in isolation. Second, the wiki format disperses the cost of monitoring politicians' professed positions and compliance with their promises, lowering the investment demanded of any particular activist.

There are, however, a few obvious hurdles this approach will have to face. First, there is a chicken-and-egg problem. Candidates will find it worth their while to forsake the significant benefits of accepting PAC and lobbyist money only if they are persuaded that it is outweighed by the electoral advantage to be gained by wooing Change Congress voters. But the widespread adoption of the Change Congress platform by voters will depend in part on the existence of candidates who are prepared to take the pledge. Second, and perhaps more seriously, there's the poor track record of previous efforts that rely on voluntary pledges by politicians. U.S. Term Limits and Americans for Tax Reform have sought promises from candidates to restrict their own tenure in office and to oppose all tax increases, but both promises have been routinely broken by officeholders without any obvious political backlash. But then, for the man who spent a decade trying to upend American copyright law, an uphill battle is nothing new.