From an Institute for Free Speech symposium on the 50th anniversary of Buckley, which I'll be cross-posting over the next couple of weeks; this is by David M. Primo, Ani and Mark Gabrellian Professor at the University of Rochester and the co-author of Campaign Finance and American Democracy: What the Public Really Thinks and Why It Matters (and an expert witness in numerous campaign finance cases):
In ruling campaign spending limits to be unconstitutional, the Buckley decision handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1976 reshaped election law, affirming that First Amendment protections extended to the speech of political candidates. It also made clear that campaign contributions were protected by the First Amendment and that such restrictions could only be justified to prevent corruption or the "appearance of corruption." I am grateful to the Court for its defense of the First Amendment. Still, I have felt compelled throughout my career to ask: do contribution limits actually achieve these goals?
If you ask Americans, as I have, whether the campaign finance system is corrupt, around 80% say yes. Meanwhile, courts since Buckley have largely agreed that most contribution limits—except really tiny ones—are self-evidently helpful for reducing corruption and the appearance of corruption, thereby ensuring "that confidence in the system of representative Government is not to be eroded to a disastrous extent." Reformers have beaten the "restore trust in government" drum to justify campaign finance laws ever since.
As a social scientist, I think evidence matters. Just because the public or the courts say something is true doesn't make it so. Fortunately, 50 years on from Buckley, we have reams of data on attitudes toward government, and we can use that data to better understand the relationship between the appearance of corruption and contribution limits.
For our 2020 book Campaign Finance and American Democracy: What the Public Really Thinks and Why It Matters, Jeff Milyo (who has written a thought-provoking essay for this series) and I built a dataset of nearly 60,000 survey respondents over a 30-year period from 1987 to 2017. These individuals answered questions about trust and confidence in government, and we know a lot of other things about them: their ideology, party affiliation, age, education, and so on. Meanwhile, states vary in whether they have contribution limits and when they implemented them, making them what political scientists are fond of calling "laboratories of democracy."
