The Appearance of Corruption

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
Daron R. Shaw ◽  
Brian E. Roberts ◽  
Mijeong Baek
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Free Speech ◽  
Campaign Finance ◽  
Political Process ◽  
Behavioral Model ◽  
Political Campaigns ◽  
The Political ◽  
The U.S ◽  
Money In Politics

Chapter 1 describes the Supreme Court’s reasoning on campaign finance regulation, free speech, and political campaigns and then offers a chapter-by-chapter plan for testing the key assumptions underlying the Court’s reasoning. The behavioral model of the Buckley v. Valeo (1976) links individuals’ perceptions of corruption to their decisions to participate politically, hypothesizing that the greater an individual’s perception of corruption the less likely that person is to participate in the political process (e.g., vote) because of an erosion of trust in government. Based on these assumptions, the Court accepts the mitigation of corruption as the (lone) compelling state interest for limits on money in politics. Chapter 1 outlines how the authors will empirically explore the behavioral model posited by the U.S. Supreme Court in its 1976 Buckley v. Valeo decision.

The Appearance of Corruption

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daron R. Shaw ◽  
Brian E. Roberts ◽  
Mijeong Baek
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Campaign Finance ◽  
Behavioral Model ◽  
Political Speech ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Original Survey ◽  
And Behavior ◽  
Political Opinions ◽  
Modern Era ◽  
The U.S

The sanctity of political speech is a key element of the U.S. Constitution and a cornerstone of the American republic. When the Supreme Court linked political speech to campaign finance in its landmark Buckley v. Valeo (1976) decision, the modern era of campaign finance regulation was born. In practical terms, this decision meant that in order to pass constitutional muster, any laws limiting money in politics must be narrowly tailored and serve a compelling state interest. The lone state interest the Court was willing to entertain was the mitigation of corruption. In order to reach this argument the Court advanced a sophisticated behavioral model, one with key assumptions about how laws will affect voters’ opinions and behavior. These assumptions have received surprisingly little attention in the literature. This book takes up the task of identifying and analyzing empirically the Court’s presumed links between campaign finance regulations and political opinions and behavior. In so doing, we rely on original survey data and experiments from 2009–2016 to openly confront the question of what happens when the Supreme Court is wrong, and when the foundation of over forty years of jurisprudence is simply not true.

Distributive Autonomy, The Constitution, and Campaign Finance

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Attanasio
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Free Speech ◽  
Campaign Finance ◽  
Electoral Behavior ◽  
The Political ◽  
Right To Know ◽  
False Information ◽  
Presidential Candidates ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Wealthy Donors

In Kovacs v. Cooper, the Supreme Court permitted government to regulate the volume of sound trucks. One opinion stated that free speech does not include freedom “to drown out the natural speech of others.” Campaign speech of by interests drowns out all other campaign speech. This problem heavily distorts both the speaker’s right to speak and the listener’s right to know. The distortions disadvantage poorly financed candidates and mislead voters. What people think are the most important issues will be distorted; so will intensity of feelings on those issues. Such distortions will systematically skew electoral behavior based on false information. These distortions impair distributive autonomy of both listeners and speakers. In 2016, both presidential candidates overwhelmingly catered to wealthy donors. In this milieu, wealthy donors comprise the political “in” group; that is, the group who dominates government. Everyone else (the vast majority of voters) is a political “out.”

Democracy and the Freedom of Speech: Rethinking the Conflict between Liberty and Equality

2013 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 293-311 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yasmin Dawood
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Campaign Finance ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Other ◽  
Supreme Court Of Canada ◽  
Competing Values ◽  
Political Equality ◽  
Normative Claim ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
The U.S

This article re-examines the distinction between the libertarian approach and the egalitarian approach to the regulation of campaign finance. The conventional approach (as exemplified by the work of Owen Fiss and Ronald Dworkin) is to reconcile the competing values of liberty and equality. By contrast, this article advances the normative claim that democracies should seek to incorporate both the libertarian and the egalitarian approaches within constitutional law. I argue that instead of emphasizing one value over the other, the ideal position is one that simultaneously recognizes the values of liberty and equality despite the irreconcilable tension between them. Rather than choosing one value over the other, or reconciling these values by redefining them, I claim that it is vital to maintain the tension between liberty and equality by instantiating the conflict in law. Democracy is better served when the law contains an explicit tension between these foundational values.After setting forth this normative framework, I then apply it to the campaign finance decisions of the Supreme Courts of the United States and Canada, respectively. I make two main claims. First, I argue that although the libertarian/egalitarian distinction is usually presented as a binary choice, the laws of a given jurisdiction often simultaneously display both libertarian and egalitarian characteristics. For this reason, I claim that the libertarian/egalitarian distinction is better conceived of as a “libertarian-egalitarian spectrum.” Second, I argue that in recent years, the U.S. Supreme Court and the Supreme Court of Canada, respectively, have privileged one value—liberty or equality—at the expense of the other. The U.S. Supreme Court has over-emphasized the value of liberty (most notably in its Citizens United decision), with the result that political equality is markedly undermined. By the same token, the Supreme Court of Canada’s commitment to equality has become too one-sided in recent cases (Harper and Bryan), with the result that there are significant impairments to free speech liberties. I argue that both of these approaches are detrimental to democratic participation and governance. Finally, this article offers a preliminary proposal for how courts and legislatures can allow for the conflict between liberty and equality to be instantiated in law.

scholarly journals Elonis v. United States: The Doctrine of True Threats: Protecting Our Ever-Shrinking First Amendment Rights in the New Era of Communication

2015 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-223
Author(s):  
Mary Margaret Roark
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
First Amendment ◽  
Free Speech ◽  
Freedom Of Speech ◽  
The United States ◽  
New Era ◽  
The Public ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The U.S

The First Amendment protects one of our most precious rights as citizens of the United States—the freedom of speech. Such protection has withstood the test of time, even safeguarding speech that much of the population would find distasteful. There is one form of speech which cannot be protected: the true threat. However, the definition of what constitutes a "true threat" has expanded since its inception. In the new era of communication—where most users post first and edit later—the First Amendment protection we once possessed has been eroded as more and more speech is considered proscribable as a "true threat." In order to adequately protect both the public at large and our individual right to free speech, courts should analyze a speaker’s subjective intent before labeling speech a "true threat." Though many courts have adopted an objective, reasonable listener test, the U.S. Supreme Court now has the opportunity, in deciding Elonis v. United States, to take a monumental step in protecting the First Amendment right to free speech. By holding that the speaker’s subjective intent to threaten is necessary for a true threat conviction, the Court will restore the broad protection afforded by the First Amendment and repair years of erosion caused by an objective approach.

The Woman Suffrage Movement in the United States

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca J. Mead
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Political Process ◽  
The United States ◽  
Woman Suffrage ◽  
The Political ◽  
Nineteenth Amendment ◽  
Suffrage Movement ◽  
The U.S ◽  
Woman Suffrage Movement

Woman suffragists in the United States engaged in a sustained, difficult, and multigenerational struggle: seventy-two years elapsed between the Seneca Falls convention (1848) and the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment (1920). During these years, activists gained confidence, developed skills, mobilized resources, learned to maneuver through the political process, and built a social movement. This essay describes key turning points and addresses internal tensions as well as external obstacles in the U.S. woman suffrage movement. It identifies important strategic, tactical, and rhetorical approaches that supported women’s claims for the vote and influenced public opinion, and shows how the movement was deeply connected to contemporaneous social, economic, and political contexts.

In Search of a Coherent Theory of Voting Rights: Challenges to the Supreme Court's Vision of Fair and Effective Representation

1994 ◽  
Vol 56 (3) ◽  
pp. 503-523 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark E. Rush
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Political Process ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
Federal Courts ◽  
The Political ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Legal Scholarship ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Political Realities ◽  
Effective Representation

The Supreme Court's approach to representation and redistricting has been grounded on a vision of fairness which extends only as far as the electoral process itself. Accordingly, the doctrine of one-person one-vote, as well as the Court's advocacy of remedial redistricting measures, has focused on ensuring that the electoral routes to legislative representation remained open. Recently, a new wave of challenges to this approach has arisen in legal scholarship and the lower federal courts because its focus on maintaining an open and pluralist political process overlooks the political realities of governing: gaining representation means little if one remains an impotent minority. This article assesses the merits of this new “neopluralist” challenge and the extent to which the Supreme Court and lower federal courts have already begun to incorporate some of its elements. The article concludes by pointing out that this incorporation has led to the establishment of two lines of precedent which are based on irreconcilable notions of representation.

A Note to Students About C-SPAN

1987 ◽  
Vol 54 ◽  
pp. 2-2
Author(s):  
Stephen E. Frantzich
Keyword(s):  
Political Science ◽  
Political Process ◽  
News Coverage ◽  
Academic Publishing ◽  
The Political ◽  
Woodrow Wilson ◽  
Publishing Process ◽  
Science Courses ◽  
Select Group ◽  
The U.S

The courses outlined below are designed to analyze various aspects of the American political process utilizing the capabilities of C-SPAN, the cable coverage of the U.S. Congress. Before exclaiming “Gee, goody, we get to watch T.V.,” a few words of explanation are necessary. Until recently, most students of public policy and particularly the Congress were limited to studying it from afar. Woodrow Wilson wrote his classic book Congressional Government (1888) without ever coming to Washington D.C. Many contemporary scholars and journalists interview the participants in the political process and rely on written records, but most cannot base their research on viewing Congress in action. The serious student has had to rely on selective and limited news coverage or wait for a number of years while a select group of events percolated through the academic publishing process to become part of “the literature”. Students often come away from political science courses with the impression that the discipline is solely retrospective and lack a feeling for how the tools of political science can be applied to the here and now.

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