Vox:

Last December, as part of the must-pass “CRomnibus” bill, Congress changed the lawso that political parties could raise considerably more money. Under the new rules, a single donor can now give $1.5 million to the parties during a two-year election cycle.

Good government groups were predictably upset. But another group of observers had a different view: In their view, political parties may not be perfect, but the alternative to strong political parties is extremism and chaos. They argued that you can’t get money out of politics. But you can channel it. And if you want moderation, political parties are the best channel.

Two of the leading advocates of this view, Raymond J. La Raja and Brian F. Schaffner of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, now have a new book, Campaign Finance and Political Polarization: When Purists Prevail, which makes the strongest and most extended case yet for allowing political parties to control more money. “Our argument” they write, “is that financially strong party organizations should reduce party polarization.” They’re also skeptical about small donors, which they dismiss as polarizing.

My colleague Mark Schmitt has written the definitive overview of the reform skeptic movement, a larger group of mostly academics (which include La Raja and Schaffner) who, as Schmitt explains, offer a “challenge to many of the assumptions and unexamined verities of those who aspire to reform the American political process.”

What follows here is a more targeted discussion of two specific debates this new book raises: about the value of empowering political parties, as well as its skepticism of empowering small donors. Although the small-donor critique is a side point of the book, it’s an important critique to address, given the full-fledged push by many campaign reformers into small-donor experiments.

Here’s the quick summary of my take: Stronger parties will not move to the center because there are both few meaningful opportunities to move to the center and little meaningful center to move toward. The median voter theory on which they stake so much simply does not operate under our current political rules. The claim that small donors are polarizing reflects a failure to understand how a small-donor matching system would change the incentives of running for office and of giving.

And while I disagree with the conclusions La Raja and Schaffner reach, I happily recommend their book. It’s clearly written, full of data, and provocative. And I do agree with their implicit criticism that reformers often fail to investigate their assumptions and as a result develop overly simplistic and counterproductive models of the world, often in a too simple corruption framework.