In 1996, Maine became the first American state to
enact a public financing system for statewide elections. Voters passed a referendum
by which the government provides money to candidates who meet a threshold of
fundraising in $5 increments from voters in their districts. Before 2011, candidates
got matching funds from the government if an opponent was funding his or her
campaign with their own money, or if an outside group was spending money on the
race over a certain amount.[1] The reason for the discontinuance of the
matching funds and the subsequent impact on the number of blue-collar people
running for office and being in the legislature demonstrate that the public
financing of political campaigns can have a huge impact on both political
campaigns and representation in a legislative chamber.
By 2008, 85 percent of lawmakers in the Maine
legislature were running with public funds. Passage of the referendum allowed
waitresses, teachers, firefighters, convenience store clerks and others to run
for office and win. Women benefited especially, running in greater numbers than
had been possible before. Thanks to public funding, Maine soon had the most
blue-collar legislature in the U.S. The gap between Maine’s citizens and their
representatives was effectively narrowed.
Historically, the American Founding Fathers knew
that the legislatures of the member-states were closer to the people—and not just
geographically—than the U.S. House of Representatives. Hence, some delegates at
the Constitutional Convention decried the aristocratic nature of the proposed
U.S. House. For one thing, the legislative districts of a state representative
are smaller. Partly for this reason, citizen-legislators would be more likely. By
design, the total number of legislators at the state level dwarfs the number of
representatives in the U.S. House. The Founders thus understood that the vast
repository of self-governance in the “extended republic” and the republics
within would be mostly in the state legislatures. Hence, most authority over domestic
matters was constitutionally assigned to the states, with the governmental
institutions at the federal level enjoying only limited, or enumerated, powers.
The impact of Maine’s referendum suggests that representative democracy has
greater potential at the state level than at the federal level. To be sure,
Madison’s theory that political minorities are less protected in smaller
republics represents a downside to state government relative to federal.
However, the greater presence of blue-collar people in Maine’s legislature may
mean that Madison’s theory need not apply, at least concerning economic
minorities. Unfortunately, the Maine experiment was rather severely clipped in 2011.
Specifically, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that
providing public funds to match outside groups and self-funding candidates was
a limit on their free-speech rights. Participation in Maine's public funding
system dropped to 51 percent by the 2014 election. How increasing the
money-as-speech of one person limits the free-speech of others is utterly
perplexing to me, unless the context is of two people in close proximity using
loudspeakers. At the very least, the American doctrine of free-speech had
traversed a few curves—the 2010 Citizens United case being a major case in
point.
Moreover, the court’s decision may point to a
basic bias in the American political elite in favor of great wealth. Corporate
donors would quite naturally want to squash the influx of blue-collar lawmakers—preferring
instead “professional” politicians intent on being re-elected. My basic point
is that public financing can have a huge impact not only on campaigns, but also
on the composition of legislatures. That is to say, Americans need not assume
that “deep pockets” entrenched in the status quo necessarily enjoy the
overwhelming advantage in representative democracy.
[1]
Paul Blumenthal, “Maine
Voters Hope to Restore Their Revolutionary Election System,” The Huffington
Post, September 4, 2015.
