Not Everything Is Corruption
Money does distort politics, but not as badly as you think.
There are two explanations for why the United States ends up with the policies it does.
The first blames corruption. For example, six in ten Americans favor a national health plan like Medicare-for-all. That we haven’t adopted such a policy, and instead maintain an awkwardly assembled Rube Goldberg system—hybrid, employer-based, inconsistent—should be taken as damning evidence for the perversion of the democratic process. So you follow the money. Check the backgrounds of legislators who oppose the expansion of entitlements, or even favor more modest reforms, and you’ll find a speaking gig at UnitedHealthcare or a past internship at Novartis. Head to OpenSecrets and pull the donor file; it’ll show you who’s really boss.
The second explanation appreciates just how complicated politics can be. Whenever single-payer bursts onto the national stage—Bill Clinton in 1993, Bernie Sanders in 2016—it triggers the same alarms: wait times will increase for elective surgery, end-of-life care will be rationed by “death panels,” taxes will rise even if premiums and copays fall, and the killer: you will have to give up the health care plan you like.
An overwhelming 82% of Americans say they’re satisfied with their health care coverage. These people, the second explanation admits, aren’t bought off. The polling at any given moment might look like a social-democratic supermajority in waiting, but you can bet that when the conversation kicks off again, and kitchen tables and comment sections start swarming once more with arguments about Harry and Louise or Cadillac taxes, the objections will invariably snap back. In a system that requires broad agreement across election cycles and within individual states to get things done, these are no small hurdles.
In our age of populist suspicion, many people—whether it’s the activist left, the technocratic center, or the libertarian right—reflexively say that it’s money ghostwriting our opponents’ politics. Today, nearly three-quarters of Americans believe that corruption is the main threat to our future, rating it above economic collapse or terrorism. For a country said to be irreparably polarized, it’s a remarkable point of consensus.
Yet the real story is much more complicated. Research suggests that the pernicious influence of money in politics is overstated—and, when adopted as an article of faith, this narrative risks distracting reformers from actually convincing voters.
The empirical case for the simplest version of the corruption story—call it the quid pro quo story—is shakier than is often assumed. Decades of scholarship has failed to identify a systematic causal link between congressional donations and roll-call votes. Effects shrink once you account for a politician’s existing ideology and the preferences of voters in the district. Money usually flows toward candidates who already share donors’ views, rather than flipping preferences. This is not to overlook the very real examples of corruption in the Trump era—meme coins for crypto-billionaire foreign nationals, Qatari jets, and Mar-a-Lago dinners. But they seem to be a glaring exception to a baseline of propriety.
There are contexts in which concentrated interests matter more: the low-salience, technical fights where voters aren’t as vigilant. Sugar subsidies are a classic example. Political scientist Kevin Grier and colleagues found that targeted contributions from the sugar industry are associated with more reluctance to reform subsidies.
But that is a world away from the biggest, most visible issues where voters are louder and more organized, such as top marginal tax rates, gun control, and immigration. If ambitious politicians want re-election, they don’t start by trying to convince the sugar industry. They attend first to the people who can actually fire them: the voters.
Then there’s the idea that there is too much money in politics. Yes, American political campaigns spend a lot—roughly $14.8 billion in 2024. But the scale looks awfully different in context. That same year, holiday shopping was forecast at nearly $1 trillion; Americans spent north of $100 billion a year on their pets. As Harvard political scientist Stephen Ansolabehere and colleagues put it in a 2003 article, the big puzzle is why there is so little money in U.S. politics relative to the size of the prize.
While politicians need money to run a competitive campaign, it’s far from the master key that turns them into puppets dancing on purse strings. In practice, other factors—message, charisma, timing, experience, attention, name recognition, and incumbency—matter more for electoral success. Massive spending advantages often flop: think Mike Bloomberg in 2020, or Jeb Bush in 2016. Kamala Harris outraised Donald Trump by nearly $900 million, and we know what happened there. In these high-attention contests, where voters are already familiar with the issues and candidates, advertising mostly reinforces prior views and money has diminishing returns.
Money matters more in lower-information races. Fresh-faced challengers’ electoral success rises in direct proportion to their level of spending. Yet even in these cases, where results seem to hinge on money, the villains are misunderstood. The war chests of corporate political action committees (PACs) are, confusingly, not funded directly by corporations but by small-dollar checks from individual employees, capped at $5000 a year. Many of the biggest PACs aren’t even corporate PACs but labor PACs like the Machinists/Aerospace Workers Union, which outraise many corporate PACs in total contributions. All PACs operate under strict limits on what they can give directly to candidates, with, again, a maximum of $5000 per candidate per year.
There is a bigger villain: Super PACs that can raise unlimited amounts of money for campaign advertising. Here, the story is far more concerning—but it is still more complicated than the slogans suggest.
In Buckley v. Valeo (1976), the Supreme Court was reluctant to limit independent spending on political speech and advertisements because of the First Amendment. Citizens United v. FEC (2010) extended these protections to allow unlimited independent campaign expenditures by corporations. The ruling is deeply unpopular for obvious reasons: such spending can feel like politics done over voters’ heads, by people the public did not choose. The facts bear that out, in part: nearly half of Super PAC contributions post-Citizens United have come from just 25 mega-donors.
But opponents often overstate how bad Buckley and Citizens United are for the integrity of our elections. An earlier equivalent of the Super PAC was a feature of elections until 1975, when they were temporarily curbed. Their recent rise may simply be a return to the norm. While campaign spending has increased since Citizens United, it has done so at a slower rate than before the decision. And even where there are increases, this could have some positive effects. It is difficult for insurgent or first-time campaigns to raise money, so Super PAC spending can actually amplify public participation and reduce the time challenger campaigns spend dialing for dollars. In fact, the incumbent re-election rate since Citizens United is lower than at any time since 1974—which should allay fears that money is just helping entrench an unpopular political class.
Then there is lobbying. Interest groups can and do shape the political agenda during the symbolic and preliminary phases of lawmaking. Amy McKay’s work comparing lobbying letters with Senate committee amendments finds striking overlap in language—sometimes nearly identical text—suggesting that interest groups shape what is drafted and considered, especially in low-salience, technical domains neglected by voters.
But this is not the same as “buying” a vote. When lobbyists argue with politicians during in-person meetings, give short-staffed offices fact sheets before a hearing, or conduct grassroots campaigns in congressional districts, they are engaging with the democratic process in a constitutionally-protected way, raising the salience of certain issues or giving political actors the language or numbers to defend a position they already share. Their work is persuasion through speech, and politicians can choose to agree or disagree with what they hear. These lobbyists do not simply work on behalf of big business; they work for nonprofits and unions, too. In fact, reporting suggests that some of the most effective lobbyists of the Biden era were on the economic and social left: the American Federation of Teachers influencing COVID-19 school guidance, the Debt Collective providing frameworks for student loan cancellation, or the Environmental Defense Fund pushing the Inflation Reduction Act.
Why, then, are simplistic corruption stories so compelling? It’s partly because it’s hard to believe that billions of dollars wouldn’t derail political incentives. It’s partly, too, because our system is designed to frustrate us, empowering action only after intense persuasion, coalition-building, and persistence across states and election cycles. Our record gridlock, set against a backdrop of more money than ever in our politics, leads people to think that something scandalous is taking place. But it might be more accurate to view our current stasis as driven by sincere disagreement about where to go from here.
Part of the reason we’re so unable to deal with one another is that we’re taught to view politics primarily as a clash of interests—as a series of tight-fisted power grabs—rather than as a contest among sincere claims about the common good. The Great Compromise of 1787—which created America’s bicameral legislature—can be glossed, like many K-12 civic classrooms do, as a battle between small and big states over economic power. By this view, each party in a political conflict self-consciously pursues their narrow self-interest, each only begrudgingly giving ground to get things done.
But spending time in DC or a statehouse makes you understand that most political actors are sincere in their convictions. Those politicians derided as “Establishment” or “corporate” are likely acting on real judgments about their constituents’ interests rather than on a comically-large check being slid across the table.
The greatest attraction of the simplistic corruption frame is that it flatters our worst instincts. If your opponents are bankrolled by the NRA, you don’t have to contend with the tradeoff between having fewer guns and living in a country with a citizenry able to defend itself. If the opposition to green energy is just fossil fuel companies buying votes, you don’t need to reckon with dislocation in communities centered around refineries.
None of this means corruption reformers’ work is pointless. The Trump administration has shown itself to be more than capable of flouting the traditional rules around money and influence. But we’re kidding ourselves if we think that passing some reforms reining in the top 1% will fix our politics—that we will get the gun buyback, or universal basic income, or solar farms we really want, and that it was only Big Everything stopping us.
The primary danger of overweening corruption narratives is not that they’re false. It’s that they become a lazy substitute for the difficult work of persuading our opponents.
Siddhu Pachipala studies political science at MIT. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, CNN, and Slate.
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