 Whenever an authoritarian dictator is making a speech to their people, they always do it from some sort of really tall platform. Haven't they heard that no ledge is power? I try pretty hard not to get into political debates, because government is a complicated idea, and it's so charged with ideology that any discussion about it is usually either everyone agreeing with each other or trying to hit each other with whatever's nearby. I mean, there are people with almost every conceivable opinion about how government ought to work, based mostly on ideals and intuition, not on any sort of convincing objective evidence that one way is actually better than another. Of course, that evidence is really hard to come by because a nation's success or failure is tied to thousands of variables, from global economy to abundance of natural resources to whether or not the pope lives there. But sometimes, every once in a while, there's some genuine objective data that actually gives us something to go on, which is why these two papers are such a big deal. This first one is a study by Princeton's Martin Gillins and Northwestern University's Benjamin I Page, two political scientists who ran a detailed analysis on more than 30 years of collected data. The second one is a summary of findings from over 80 separate studies of money and politics by Thomas Stratman at George Mason University. This is an ideological rambling. This is a carefully measured and exacting analysis of money and political power in the United States, and it's really disturbing. Gillins and Page looked at the political opinions of a variety of individuals on over 2,000 separate issues. Do you think the minimum wage should be raised? Do we spend enough on education? Should we sanction this country or send troops there? They compared opinions on those issues to the legislation the government actually enacted, looking to see which groups got what they wanted out of their elected representatives. It turns out that unless you're an extraordinarily wealthy individual or organization, what you want is kind of irrelevant. I mean, you might look out and happen to agree with a big corporation or a well-funded lobbyist group, but if a majority of U.S. citizens want a particular bill to pass and one rich individual or corporation doesn't want it to pass, the bill won't pass. Wow. The reasons for this are complicated, but apparently it's gotten so bad that the political system we live in isn't really a democracy anymore. I'm not being hyperbolic. Gillins and Page compared the average American citizen's political influence to the idealized average influence in various political systems. Like in a perfect democracy, the majority of the population always gets the laws that they want. In a perfect authoritarian monarchy, the king or queen always gets the laws that they want. What they found is that you and I are closer to living in a state ruled by wealthy corporations and individuals than we are to ruling ourselves. By the numbers, we're not living in a democracy any more than we're living in a communist collective or a monarchy. Holy crap. So apparently money is what gets politicians to care about what you want. Intuitively, you might expect that because politicians want that money for their next election campaign so that they can be sure that they'll still have a job. But this next paper says not so much. The paper from Stratman examines many different scientific studies on money in politics. And one of its most convincing conclusions is that past a certain threshold, there is no substantial return on increased campaign spending. Once people know that you're going to be on the ballot and your stated position on the issues, you're pretty much set. You can spend tons of cash on advertising, but you'll only see a tiny boost in your poll numbers. Like if you're spending $100,000 on a campaign and you decide to spend $50,000 more, you're only going to get 2-3% more votes. Considering that gerrymandering has most incumbents winning elections with more than 60% of the vote, that money just doesn't matter. So if politicians don't need to accept and spend that much money on election campaigns, then why do they? Why do they cater exclusively to wealthy donors? Stratman doesn't really have an answer. He suggests that maybe politicians just don't know that they don't need to spend that much on campaigning. But whatever the reason, there's something here that doesn't make sense to me. The US Supreme Court has ruled several times to weaken or remove limits on donations to political campaigns because spending money can be seen as a form of free speech. But according to the numbers, political spending doesn't affect the candidate's electability. All it does is allow the wealthy to get their attention and to purchase their support for various policies. Whatever its medium, we recognize that free speech has necessary limits because it has the potential to infringe on people's rights. And we have objective proof that money in politics serves no purpose but buying off politicians. Whatever political ideology we subscribe to, we have to recognize that if we want democracy back, if we want everybody's vote to matter, we have to limit the effects of money in politics. How can we do that? Should we forbid elected representatives from accepting any money or gifts while they're in office? Should every political candidate be allotted the same amount for their campaign from a communal pool of tax dollars? Can't we educate our politicians about how little campaign spending actually affects their numbers so that they care less about campaign contributions from the wealthy? I really have no idea if any of these solutions are feasible, but I refuse to accept a political system that is neither by the people nor for the people, at least not when I don't count as people. I mean, I love Ben Franklin, but he should not be voting. He's been dead for over 200 years. Do you have any ideas about how we might limit the effects of money in politics and in so doing, get real democracy back? Please leave comments and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to blog on, subscribe, blog share, and I'll see you next week.