Campaign finance reform: Realizing or undermining political equality in America

The subject of my dissertation is the relationship between political liberty and political equality in American politics. The point of departure is the contemporary debate over campaign finance reform. Arguably the most prominent argument used to justify campaign finance reform today is the contention that protecting political equality requires the regulation or restriction of political liberty. Working from a conception of democracy that requires an equality of influence among its citizens, many politicians, political scientists, political theorists, and legal scholars contend that a government that protects the individual's right to speak and write free from government restraint simply enables individuals with superior electorally-valuable resources to ‘drown out’ the voice of those lacking comparable resources. If the equality principle is to be secured, and the government's responsiveness to all the people restored, accordingly, government must regulate individual political liberty in whatever ways are necessary to promote a greater equality of influence.;The purpose of the dissertation is to trace the origins of the perceived opposition between the requirements of political equality and political liberty. In the first three chapters, I demonstrate that this opposition is neither inherent in the theoretical understanding of the American founding, nor in the founding generation's (or their early nineteenth century descendents), assessment of the effects of protecting political liberty in practice. On the contrary, I explain why those who were most eager to preserve the people's influence over government believed the protection of political liberty was so vital. In the fourth chapter, I trace the roots of the opposition to the progressive rejection of the Founders' theory of government in favor of a superficially similar but fundamentally different conception of democracy, as well as their reassessment of the effects of protecting political liberty in practice. Finally, in the fifth chapter, I show how the new understanding of equality derived from the progressive conception of government has led to the democratization of political liberty, individually and negatively understood, in the area of campaign finance.