| What lies ahead is an interdisciplinary analysis of the United States Supreme Court's contemporary debates on the question of corruption in political electioneering.;The central claim of this dissertation is that concepts from political economy and liberal market theories constitute the main current of forty-years of Supreme Court debate. The Court has appropriated concepts such as market, money, unfettered competition, and so forth, all of which point at an expressive use of economic principles. This has led to a meta-narrative, where those economic principles find their reaffirmation in the context of debates on Free Speech and its corruptibility.;Section One offers an analysis of how Court's discourse presents the relation between electioneering communication and its corruptibility.;Section Two presents how the Court has embraced economic concepts of marketplace based on a dated 17th and 18th century laissez-faire vision of markets.;Our claim is that a contemporary understanding of political economy can help conceptualize institutional interventions, such as, campaign regulation, as the precondition for a proper functioning market of political ideas. Rather than rejecting that political economy has a place in electioneering, we propose a pragmatic vision as to the function political economy plays in electioneering. Those who admonish the negative impact that excess capital inflict on the integrity of the electioneering system, ought consider the following stratagem in the debate of disproportional wealth in politics.;Rather than rejecting on normative grounds the role of money in politics, these critics may be well advised to 'embrace' the dominant current in the Court's debate, and which states that modern political speech is irrevocably tethered with concepts of classic political economy.;Our recommendation comes with a caveat. It comes with a modern, twenty- and twenty-first centuries view of marketplaces. This recognizes that speech in many ways does involve matters of money in politics, but so too, that the proper functioning of a marketplace is contingent on it being stabilized and embedded by institutional and regulatory regimes.;Conversely, the mere reference to the gilded concept of 'invisible hand', is insufficient an explication to understand of how marketplaces contribute to modern political speech. |
