Democratic Theory and Political Campaigns

Abstract

CHOLARLY debates about political campaigns often focus on topics like “negative advertising” and campaign finance. Although these are important issues, attending to them before one has developed a comprehensive and systematic critique of campaigns is tantamount to putting the cart before the horse. In other words, it is necessary to identify the values one believes campaigns should uphold, and the kind of “information environment” that is required to promote these values in the period preceding an election, before one begins to make claims about specific campaign funding schemes and the way candidates should campaign. This paper explores one way of conducting such a critique by considering what a campaign would look like if certain political values representing different strains of contemporary democratic thought were consistently applied to all elements of the campaign process. Specifically, I consider what electoral competitiveness, political equality and deliberation require of campaigns and how these values can be enhanced through certain reforms. Ideally, of course, we want campaigns to function in a way that advances all of these values, but by focusing on them individually, we can see where tensions may arise between them, and perhaps more importantly, where they prescriptively overlap. This is especially important for identifying what kind of campaign and election reforms deserve the most attention from scholars and political reformers. I begin by briefly describing how I define political competitiveness, political equality and deliberation, and then proceed by considering what kind of information environment bolsters each of these political values within the context of a political campaign. This approach forces us to consider how formal rules and regulations, such as election procedures and campaign finance restrictions, structure a campaign’s information environment in ways that substantively affect the realization of these political values. The second part examines the effect of these rules and regulations more closely by drawing upon