Many people are going to be infuriated today. But their fury is based on an unproven, quite possibly false, assumption.

USA Today writes:

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court took another step Wednesday toward giving wealthy donors more freedom to influence federal elections. The justices ruled 5-4, in a decision written by Chief Justice John Roberts, that limits on the total amount of money donors can give to all candidates, committees and political parties are unconstitutional. The decision leaves in place the base limits on what can be given to each individual campaign.

I’m ideologically neutral on this issue. Is spending money on other people’s campaigns a form of speech? On deontological grounds alone, I could go either way. For me, if I had very strong empirical evidence that campaign finance limits like the one just struck down produced better government, I’d be fine with them. Without that evidence, I’m not in favor of the ban. I have no deontological or ideological stake in this; I just care about the consequences.

So, what are the consequences? Many people are convinced that money buys power, specifically, that campaign spending buys power. The worries are:

Money Makes Winners: Wealthy donors can give more money to candidates they favor. As a result–because these candidates get more money–they are more likely to win. Money Shapes Winners: Wealthy donors can give more money to candidates they favor. As a result–because the candidates depend on the donations–they are more likely to vote in favor of the interest of the wealthy, rather than for their sincere policy preferences.

Both of these worries are entirely sensible and plausible. But are the worries true? A political philosopher wouldn’t want to just assume the worries are true without looking at the available political evidence. That would show some serious ideological bias.

Political scientists ask, does money make winners, or chase them (or both)? Even it were clear that the better financed campaigns tend to win, do they win because they are better financed, or are they better financed because they are more likely to win, or is there some third factor that explains both? When people, including wealthy people, spend money on campaigns, are these campaign expenditures best modeled as a form of investment (an attempt to produce the favored outcomes) or a form of consumption (people enjoy participating in the political process, and this is a way of participating)?

There are a huge number of empirical papers that try to test, from a wide variety of angles using a wide variety of methods and data, both the Money Makes Winners and Money Shapes Winners theses. The results are pretty ambiguous. There are quite a few papers finding an effect, though not usually a huge one. There are many more papers finding no effect or failing to find an effect. And there are other papers with mixed results. The upshot? As Hans Noel says in his paper “10 Things Political Scientists Know that You Don’t”: (

#1. It’s The Fundamentals, Stupid The most exciting and visible part of politics is the political campaign. Politicians and their team of strategists, pollsters, and surrogates wage battle for the votes of the public. Slogans are trumpeted. Gaffes are made. Tactics are deployed. And it probably does not matter all that much. At least not as much as the political environment matters. Presidential elections can be forecast with incredible accuracy well before the campaign really begins. In fact, if all you know is the state of the economy, you know pretty well how the incumbent party will do. See, for instance, Figure 1. If you account for a little bit more, like whether the country is at war, how long the president’s party has held the office, and which candidate is more ideologically moderate, you can do even better. (Gelman and King, 1993, Vavreck, 2009, Hibbs, 2000, Bartels and Zaller, 2001). Something similar is true for congressional elections, even midterm elec- tions, although the relationships are not as strong, and the evidence is more mixed. Individual races are hard to predict. But in the aggregate, the fundamentals matter again. In midterms, the public’s perception of the president has a huge impact. And note that the president’s party almost always loses seats in midterm elections. In a down economy, a lot of loss should be expected, even without any reference to the specific policies of the incumbent…. …#10 We Do Not Know What You Think You Know …the biggest challenge political science may give to practitioners might be that we acknowledge what we do not know. It is not that campaigns do not matter at all in presidential elections. It is that after decades of searching, we have found so little evidence that they do and so much evidence that the fundamentals matter more. But the fact that we have not found evidence should not convince you that there is nothing to find. …The goal of political science is to make sure the things we think are true really are. This can be frustrating for practitioners who need to move ahead. There may be no evidence that a sound-bite will tip the scale, but it might, and so the practitioner must try. But political commentary ought at least to acknowledge what we do not know. Among the things that we think we know, but that political scientists have found at best mixed evidence for: Money buys the votes of the general public. (Maybe savvy donors just donate to candidates who will win in the hopes of influencing them.) Money buys the votes of elected legislators. (Maybe savvy donors just donate to candidates who will vote the way they would like, and not to those who would not.) As I say in Libertarianism, following the famous paper “Why Is There So Little Money in U.S. Politics?” (Hey, read this too, while you’re at it): In fact, there is very little money in politics. In the 2008 US federal elections, presidential candidates raised nearly $2 billion. They spent more than $1 billion. Congressional campaigns spent another 1/3rd of a billion. Let’s round up: Assume candidates and PACs spend $2.5 billion total during every presidential election. That might seem like a huge sum, but it’s not. Consider that the federal government spent about $2.9 trillion in 2008. Campaign spending is less than 1/10th of a percent of the federal of the federal budget. Percentage-wise, that’s a tiny amount spent to control so much power and such a huge budget. (Note, also that the budget could be much bigger than it is. Candidates—and their corporate supporters—are not just competing to control the current federal budget, but also the potential budget.) Compare: In 2008, Nike had an operating budget of about $7 billion and global revenues of about $15 billion. Yet Nike spent about $2.5–3 billion worldwide on all advertising and marketing. In other words, total campaign spending in the US, during one of the most intense elections ever, is about equal to Nike’s marketing budget. If campaign spending really did buy laws and regulations, we would expect spending to be at least an order of magnitude higher. Maybe this Supreme Court ruling will be a disaster. But I can’t see how someone familiar with the academic literature on this topic could feel comfortable believing that. You’d have to say that the majority of papers on the topic are bunk and the few supporting the view are right. I’m happy to just defer to the political scientists here. But my reading of that lit, like Noel’s, is that campaign spending matters much less than most people think, and thus we aren’t epistemically justified in getting too worried about this Supreme Court decision.