In my view, campaign contributions are rarely corrupting in the sense that they improperly influence a legislator’s political position. There can be no doubt, however, that they greatly influence how he spends his political capital.
While a given congressman may support an endless number of groups and causes, there are only so many in whose service he can tack on a spending project to a bloated omnibus bill or insert an obscure rider into an unrelated regulatory measure or cash in a favor with a powerful committee chairman.
A candidate’s expressed views, then, may tell you something about where he stands on a given issue; but his roster of contributors provides the most reliable indicator of who he is willing to go to the mat for. Transparency, in this way, sheds light on the actual law that will get made as a result of a particular person taking office.
This not only injects an element of realism into the concept of representation, but also makes legislators conscious of how extra efforts on behalf of contributors might be perceived. What results is hesitation, or even unwillingness, to spend a disproportionate amount of political capital on favored donors – which can only make interest groups less eager to offer up self-interested contributions in the first place. Thus emerges a virtuous cycle, however mild, in terms of the priorities of elected officials and the comparative agency of citizens.
But if we only focus on the what — or outputs — of politics, as Bill suggests, these benefits are less easily realized. Voters will be denied the narrative necessary to put their congressman’s (often unintelligible) acts of lawmaking in perspective.