Tom Edsall in the NYT does a masterful job synthesizing the state-of-the-art empirical knowledge on how changes in recent years to the way elections are financed have contributed to polarization and extremism. Relying on this data, the piece makes two main points.
The first is that campaigns have come increasingly to rely on individual donors and spenders. And one of the most robust social-science findings in this area is that individual donors — large and small — are both the most ideologically motivated donors and have more extreme ideological views than average citizens. This is particularly true for small donors. One study cited finds “that the total number of individual donors grew from 5.2 million in 2006 to 195.0 million in 2020. Over the same period, the average size of contributions fell from $292.10 to $59.70.”
As one cited study also found:
Republican donors’ views are especially conservative on economic issues relative to Republican citizens, but are typically closer to Republican citizens’ views on social issues. By contrast, Democratic donors’ views are especially liberal on social issues relative to Democratic citizens’, whereas their views on economic issues are typically closer to Democratic citizens’ views. Finally, both groups of donors are more pro-globalism than citizens are, but especially Democratic donors.
The NYT piece notes that this explains:
a variety of puzzles in contemporary American politics, including: the Republican Party passing fiscally conservative policies that we show donors favor but which are unpopular even with Republican citizens; the focus of many Democratic Party campaigns on progressive social policies popular with donors, but that are less publicly popular than classic New Deal economic policies; and the popularity of anti-globalism candidates opposed by party establishments, such as Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.
The piece quotes from my work demonstrating how small donors fuel extremism:
“As a case in point, Pildes noted that in the 2022 elections, House Republicans who backed Trump and voted to reject the Electoral College count on Jan. 6 received an average of $140,000 in small contributions, while House Republicans who opposed Trump and voted to accept Biden’s victory received far less in small donations, an average of $40,000.”
The second major point in the article is that,when money is funneled away from political parties to outside groups, that also contributes to extremism and polarization. Party funding is a source of moderation b/c parties support competitive candidates regardless of candidate ideology.
The piece quotes Thad Kousser, a political scientist at the University of California-San Diego:
“Parties often played a beneficial role,” he added, “helping to bind together broad coalitions on one side or the other and boosting electoral competition by giving in the most competitive races, regardless of a candidate’s ideology. Then much of their power was taken away, and other forces, often more ideologically extreme and always less transparent, were elevated.”And also this from Ray La Raja and Brian Schaffner:
“a vast body of research on democratic politics indicates that parties play several vital roles, including aggregating interests, guiding voter choices and holding politicians accountable with meaningful partisan labels. Yet this research seems to have been ignored in the design of post-Watergate reforms.”
If we accept the data, what reforms might follow, in principle (whether they could be enacted is a difft matter)? One is traditional public financing, where the source of funding doesn’t favor any particular type of ideological candidates. The second is encouraging more money to flow through the political parties, rather than outside groups.