Dollars and Votes: How business Campaign Contributions Subvert Democracy. - book reviews

Sierra, Sept-Oct, 1998 by Bob Schildgen

* For a scholarly study of perversity," there's Dollars and Votes: How Business Campaign Contributions Subvert Democracy by Dan Clawson, Alan Newstadtl, and Mark Weller (Temple University Press, $19.95). The authors don't bother to troll for campaign-money scandals or secret payoffs, because they find that legal funding maneuvers are as effective as bribery anyhow, but without the risk.

Money from corporate political action committees not only helps elect business-anointed candidates, but buys access to lawmakers by creating "networks of obligation." Comparing the symbiosis of PACs and politicians to that of gift-givers in "primitive" societies, where reciprocation is the rule, the study shows lawmakers responding to PACs with personal audiences, staff help, and intervention in the regulatory process. The authors interview dozens of corporate officials who candidly--and often amusingly--describe their dollars at work. The most exquisite example details how corporate-backed riders slipped into the 1996 minimum-wage law netted a staggering $16.2 billion in tax breaks and subsidies.

They also bust many myths, like the one that makes Big Labor/Big Environment the mighty equal of Big Business merely by virtue of capital letters. In "soft money" contributions, the "balance is far more than 15 to 1 for business over labor," while environmentalists are "hardly a blip on the screen." Among their proposed solutions is public funding of campaigns, along the lines of Maine's Clean Elections Act.