| "Coining Corruption: Deliberative Democracy, the Constitution and the Making of the American Campaign Finance System, 1876--1976," explores the interconnections between law, politics, and culture as they created the campaign finance system. Beginning with the 1876 restriction of political assessments on federal employees and the first US Supreme Court case examining that law in 1882, my study considers how law and legal doctrine shaped, and were shaped by, social conceptions of corruption and democracy. The inter-relationship of those conceptions to concurrent understandings of participatory democracy informed both the attempts and the resistance to efforts to reform the campaign finance system. During the Gilded Age, the rise of corporate wealth and power established a baseline of rights rhetoric that made real reform appear radical. The McKinley-Bryan contest of 1896 and the anti-Populist backlash funded by corporate campaign contributions channeled the economic power of the business sector into the politico-legal realm. Progressive Era reforms, coupled with issues of race, class, and gender, began a counterattack against those business interests, but judicial doctrine and the federalist structure of American government stifled the most significant of the reform attempts. Throughout the 1930--1950s, the law, including most significantly, the role of mass communications, labor, special interest groups, and the shifting concepts of free speech doctrine, worked its power over reform efforts, limiting their scope and effectiveness. By 1972, with the catalyst of the Watergate disclosures, grand efforts to limit the power of money in the election process took hold, yet continued to clash against liberal conceptions of civil rights. The 1976 case of Buckley v. Valeo which arose out of the Watergate reforms remains the baseline for all modern campaign finance reform efforts.; My dissertation discovers the intellectual connections between public conceptions of corruption and deliberative democracy. This work concludes by analyzing how practical politics grew increasingly professional, clashed for a century with legal doctrine and the Supreme Court whose mission and mentality remained attenuated from those day to day political concerns. The law, evolving from formalist Gilded age conceptions of laissez-faire constitutionalism to Watergate-era liberalism changed and challenged the intellectual debates about the meaning of corruption and reform as it privileged individual libertarian values over the collectivist values essential to deliberative democracy. |
