CORRUPTION Syndromes of Corruption

Influence Markets 73
with hard money. Now, when facing well-heeled challengers, such hardmoney
fundraising will be even easier.
A question of trust?
The American campaign finance system may do tolerably well at inhibiting
outright bribery, but it does far less to encourage open, competitive
politics or a popular sense that participation is effective. Disclosure of
contributions and spending – intended to encourage voters to punish
miscreants at the polls – more likely creates images of a flood of specialinterest
money. A widespread, if diffuse, perception that electoral politics
has been captured by wealth may be the most significant legacy of past
reforms. A CBS News poll, in 2000, found that 11 percent of registered
voters believed only ‘‘minor changes’’ were needed to improve ‘‘the way
political campaigns are funded in the United States,’’ while 43 percent
backed ‘‘fundamental changes’’ and 42 percent said that ‘‘we need to
completely rebuild it’’ (Pollingreport.com, 2004). Further reform attracts
surprisingly little public backing: in 2000, for example, only 1 percent of a
Fox News national survey named campaign finance reform as one of ‘‘the
two most important issues for the federal government to address’’
(Citizens Research Foundation, 2002), and 59 percent of those responding
to a 1997 Gallup Poll said that even if major reforms are enacted
‘‘special interests will always find a way to maintain their power in
Washington.’’ When the question was repeated in 2000 the share saying
‘‘special interests’’ would maintain their power had risen to 64 percent
(Pollingreport.com, 2004).
The Influence Market described here and its consequences are legal
for the most part, which may say as much or more about the way laws
accommodate behavior as about any inherent morality in the process. Yet
it fits our notion of systemic corruption problems. An older way to think
about corruption – one we could broadly call classical – is helpful here.
Corruption in that view is not a characteristic of a particular person or
deed, but a collective state of being – in effect, a deterioration of a state’s
capacity to elicit the loyalty of its citizens (Dobel, 1978; see also Euben,
1978). If politics has become a mere extension of markets – or, if a
substantial proportion of people believe that it has – the system risks losing
the trust of citizens and its ability to draw upon private participation
and preferences to make legitimate, genuinely public policies. The core
problem is not lawbreaking as such, but rather the widespread perception
that the whole system, and with it the opportunities and guarantees
supposedly provided to citizens, has become an Influence Market corrupted
by collusion between wealth and power.