Kurt Hohenstein . Coining Corruption: The Making of the American Campaign Finance System. DeKalb : Northern Illinois University Press . 2007 . Pp. x, 310. $45.00.

Abstract

In this thoughtful, well-researched book, Kurt Hohenstein traces the ways that dominant conceptions of political corruption have changed over time, and he persuasively documents the implications of these changing understandings for the regulation of campaign finance. In doing so, he successfully fuses political and policy history with legal history, analyzing reform efforts in Congress with the same insight that he brings to explaining the evolution of legal doctrine in court decisions. At the heart of Hohenstein's text is a long-term struggle between a narrow and an expanded definition of corrupt political practice that demanded regulation. A quid pro quo conception of corruption targeted only the delivery of tangible favors in return for campaign contributions; an expanded definition supported a wider-ranging regulatory regime in order to promote deliberative democracy. Emphasizing the importance of free speech in politics, the Supreme Court's landmark Buckley v. Valeo decision of 1976 adopted the former understanding, and it influentially limited the constitutionally permissible extent of campaign finance regulation. Although it is the narrow conception of corruption that became dominant, Hohenstein persuasively shows that the Supreme Court overlooked a reform tradition that was friendly to regulation for the promotion of effective democratic discourse. In post-Watergate amendments of the 1971 Federal Election Campaign Act—tested in Buckley—Congress had “tended to ignore the broad principles of equality and democratic deliberation that most previous campaign finance reforms had addressed” (p. 222), thus squandering the opportunity offered by scandal for more extensive change. As the Buckley decision then revealed, courts saw the freedom of speech as the best way to protect democratic freedoms; “the decreasing political competence of courts caused them to evaluate and decide cases using individualist principles in which they were trained and with which they were most familiar that allowed them to decide cases without engaging the bigger democratic questions” (p. 216). The result was a definition of corruption that “ignored political reality” (p. 11).