Out of Academia and into the Public Consciousness

Lawrence Lessig is a Harvard Law professor who ran for the Democratic nomination as a referendum candidate, namely campaign finance reform. He was unable to meet the requirements to attend the debates and had to subsequently suspend his campaign. This was unfortunate because campaign finance reform is the fundamental issue as Lessig sees it; without it, nothing else matters. His absence deprived the American public of a chance to understand what the root problem of our kind of democracy is. More importantly, it deprived the American public of the necessary vocabulary to discuss and debate the issue. He was well suited to bring the study of institutional corruption out of academia and into the public consciousness.

Lessig gave a series of talks beginning in Oct 2014 that he titled America: Compromised — Studies in Institutional Corruption, with his paradigm case later becoming the basis of the book Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress — and a Plan to Stop It. These talks were designed to bring the past and current research to bear on the institutions that have the most influence in our lives. He begins with what he considers as the paradigm case, Congress. He then moves on to apply the study of this paradigm to other institutions; namely Finance, Media, and Academia. While the latter are of great importance, Lessig is correct in saying that Congress is fundamental. A case can be made whether or not financial institutions, the media, or academia best serve the public interest as public or private institutions, i.e. what kind of dependence they should carry. Congress, on the other hand, is by its very nature public. Its dependency should be on the people alone. No reasonable argument can be made that Congress should not be of the people, by the people and for the people.

If there is anything to take away from the study of institutional corruption it is the differentiation of corruption as quid pro quo and corruption as improper dependence. It is easy to understand quid pro quo as corruption in Congress; we as humans are striving for that simplicity, that quid pro quo that makes cause and effect so manifest. If, in the context of Congress, a representative exchanges a specific vote for money from an individual, or, conversely, an individual exchanges money for a specific vote from a representative, this behavior is ethically wrong and the act is viewed as corruption. The agents involved are deemed “corrupt” and the money and votes “bribes.” It is clear that if this were standard practice and completely widespread, then Congress, as an institution, would be corrupt; let us say more specifically corrupt in the sense of quid pro quo. Is this the only way Congress can become corrupt? Lessig and others would suggest no. Congress can become corrupt due to an improper dependence from some outside source. Congress was designed to be dependent on the people alone. With the influx of massive campaign contributions to Congress, an improper dependency was introduced that has ultimately made Congress, as an institution, corrupt; let us say more specifically corrupt in the sense of improper dependence. Do we say that the various campaign contributions are then “bribes” and the representatives and lobbyists “corrupt,” as we did before? No, there is no one-to-one correspondence here. It is, in fact, dangerous to describe them as such because a bribe is by definition quid pro quo. When a donation is described as a bribe it comes with its concomitant corruption, but this corruption is corruption as quid pro quo and not the corruption that the public needs to address, namely corruption as improper dependence.

The English language and the American people, culturally, have an agency problem. This problem ultimately has its roots in biology, but as systems are studied with more and more granularity, it is understood that not everything needs to have a purposeful intervention to arrive at an observed phenomenon. We speak in terms that attribute agency to not only every action, but also to every measurable result. For any measurable effect, there must be some agent that exercises free will as a cause. It is simply not true, even logically for that matter, that if all Congressmen and lobbyists being corrupt implies that Congress is corrupt, then Congress being corrupt implies all Congressmen and lobbyists are corrupt. Put another way, Congressmen and lobbyists do not need to be corrupt in order to make Congress, as an institution, corrupt. One can say that, for Congress, corruption is an emergent property of a system that carries this type of (improper) dependence. Emergence comes from many systems. In weather, it is the emergence of a funnel shape for tornadoes or hurricanes when certain conditions are met. In biology, it is the emergence of the complex pattern of a flock of birds in the air or a shoal of fish in the sea. Nothing purposefully creates a tornado or hurricane, it emerges naturally when the right conditions are present. The swarming patterns of birds and fish are not decided upon by the group, but merely emerge from the dependence of each on its nearest neighbor. There is no agency to swarming, as there is no agency to a funnel (nor for that matter to a swarming funnel of ants in a death spiral). There are rules that govern the various phenomena: fluid dynamics in the case of weather, moving in the direction of your nearest neighbors and away from threats in the case of swarms. In the case of Congress, the rules of human behavior govern making it even more complex and more difficult to understand. Lobbyists aren’t part of the shoal that is Congress. They are the predator in the water. They do not care whether an individual fish moves left or right, votes yes or no, they are only concerned with herding the shoal as an aggregate towards the surface making it easier to prey upon. Their herding calls take the form of campaign contributions. The key is to identify the dependencies of an institution, observe the result, and understand what purpose it serves. For fish, it is a dependency on neighbors resulting in a shoal formation that ensures survival. For the ants above, the dependency on pheromones is creating a spiral that will ultimately lead to their deaths. Remove the dependency and the emergent phenomenon disappears. The ants can be saved from themselves.

How can it be that an institution is corrupt without the individuals that comprise that institution themselves being corrupt? Major campaign contributors have a tremendous amount of influence over the policy makers in Congress. One can say that, although they may not be corrupt in a quid pro quo sense, they are certainly corrupting in the sense that they exert an undue amount of influence over the process. This influence tends to tip the scale towards the side of policies that favor their interests. The problem, of course, is that the major campaign contributors represent a small segment of the population. They are the economic elite and organized groups, or together taken as the affluent. The rules are for the affluent to push for policies that promote their interests while advocating against those policies that are against them, and for the Congressman to push for policies that maintain their power while blocking those that threaten it. The injection of massive campaign contributions created a dependency on money that shifted the power away from the people and to that of the affluent. The result is a Congress that is beholden to the affluent alone. Lessig describes this in detail by appealing to the nomination process. American democracy has a two-stage election process dominated by the two major political parties where candidates that do well in the primary election move on to the general election. The people have the ultimate decision in the general when it comes to electing a candidate for office, but this only comes after the affluent have donated to the candidates in the primary process. Lessig calls this type of democracy Tweedism. Donations from the affluent go to candidates in the primary that align more closely with their interests. This creates a bias filter for the general election since, in order to make it to the general, one must do well in the primary, but those that do well in the primary are overwhelmingly those that have the best funded campaigns with those funds primarily coming from the economic elite and business interests. It is no wonder why Tweedism, coupled with private campaign contributions, creates a bias filter that leaves voters with what, all too often, appears to be a choice between the lesser of two evils. This is the corruption of Congress, a corruption of improper dependence. Can Congress have a dependency on outside money and still serve the public interest? Yes. Just like the weather, all the conditions of a tornado could be present without a funnel emerging. The problem with Congress is that the tornado has already touched down.

What is the result of Tweedism with a dependency of private campaign contributions? If Congress is to be an institution of the people, by the people and for the people, then its policies should reflect the will and sentiment of the people alone. A study published in 2014 by Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page has shown that the reality is anything but. The most detailed study to date, they look at variables from 1,779 policy issues over a roughly twenty-five year period to study the independent impact of the economic elite, organized groups representing business interests, and the average voter. The findings can be summarized as follows:

When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.

The economic elites, however, have substantial influence deriving from their campaign contributions. What is most impressive about the figure above is not the flatlining of the average citizen, nor is it the high probability to adopt those policies that are favored by the economic elite. Rather, it is the effectively zero chance of adopting a policy that the economic elite do not favor. The rules of the House and Senate, along with the checks and balances of government, have resulted in a system where the status quo can be easily maintained. This is a manifestation of the American vetocracy as Francis Fukuyama describes it. A vetocracy that is able to block any policy that is not favored by campaign contributors. With the current Congress being the most unproductive in history and the current polarization making it trivially easy to block any legislation, it is no wonder why the approval rating is in the single digits. Congress as an institution is in a spiral. The center doesn’t move and the status quo is maintained. If the dependency on outside money is not removed, it will spiral to its death.

Most people have a visceral, almost intuitive, sense of what corruption is, but lack the vocabulary to speak systematically about the subject. People at times will have to appeal to an admittedly “conspiratorial” explanation; never able to “prove” the corruption they know must exist. The proof, however, is in the way that Congress does not respond to the needs of those they are there to represent. Given a framework and armed with a vocabulary such as: Tweedism, bias filter, institutional corruption, corruption as quid pro quo vs. corruption as improper dependence, and vetocracy; people will begin to understand the causes and effects of this type of corruption. A corruption that is perfectly legal and constitutionally protected. A corruption that does not violate the law, but the ethics of the institution itself. It is time to bring this study and the framework it has built out of academia and into the public discourse.