Lessig and the economy of influence

By W.W. | IOWA CITY

EARLIER this month, Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig published in the Huffington Post a somewhat breathless manifesto for a renewed anti-corporatist progressivism. Mr Lessig is rightly troubled by the corrupting influence of special interests on the political process. However, his diagnosis of the problem does not seem so promising.

[T]he corruption of today is in plain sight. The mechanism of its reach is displayed to everyone. It is the simple and pervasive economy of influence that buys access and more through campaign cash. And then without explicit recognition, the actions of our government are guided by the understanding of how those acts will affect the opportunity to raise money.

Mr Lessig writes at greater length in the same vein in an essay in the new edition of the Boston Review arguing that the American system of campaign finance, especially after the recent Citzens United decision, sets up an "economy of influence" that subverts the founders' alleged intent to keep Congress "dependent upon the People alone."

The trouble for Mr Lessig is that political scientists have found very little evidence that campaign-finance rules have much influence on the behaviour of legislators. Moreover, political scientists have found that policy does tend to track public opinion pretty closely, which seems to indicate that even if legislation reflects influences other than "the People alone", it does depend on the people more than anything else. Iowa's congressional delegation will die in the last ditch for ethanol subsidies because ethanol subsidies are very popularwith Iowa's voters, not because Big Agra cuts fat checks to Tom Harkin and Chuck Grassley.

Because, other things equal, public opinion swamps most competing determinants of policy, Mr Lessig's fixation on campaign finance seems a bit of a distraction. The interesting questions about the structure of the "economy of influence" concern who has how much influence on public opinion. Here the influence of the media looms very large, which I believe puts progressives in a somewhat uncomfortable position.

Many progressives hold to an ideal of egalitarian participatory democracy according to which something like equal voice—relative equality of influence over the democratic process—is a cherished aim. Restrictions on individual and corporate spending on political speech are thought to be necessary in order to maintain relative equality of voice and influence. However, it seems likely that these sources of influence on public opinion are quite weak relative to the mass media, in which case suppressing them through regulation will only increase the already stronger relative power of those who own and use the media's megaphones. So it is not clear to me why Mr Lessig has focused his crusade on the finance of political campaigns rather than on the massive inequalities of voice between Glenn Beck and my mechanic (or between Glenn Beck and Keith Olberman, for that matter). Why should a handful of Arianna Huffingtons and Rupert Murdochs be allowed such enormous power over public opinion and thereby over public policy? Why not regulate media with the aim of establishing fairness and balance in democratic voice?

Of course, there are many more or less obvious reasons we don't want the state deciding who can communicate how much of which message. But one very practical reason few promote regulatory limits on the media's liberty to print and broadcast whatever it likes is that the media will ferociously attack anyone who seeks to limit or moderate its massively outsized influence. Media outlets are much friendlier to proposals, such as campaign-finance reform, which tend to increase rather than diminish their relative influence over the public mind. I wonder whether Mr Lessig would count this as evidence of corruption.