Soft Parties and Strong Money

Abstract

Even in the 1,638 pages comprising the opinions of the district court judges and the more than 300 pages of opinions emerging from the Supreme Court, these maxims appeared uncontested. Of course, the agreement ended there, and the parties to the litigation, the district court judges and the Supreme Court Justices were bedeviled by the empirical details surrounding the BCRA’s soft money ban: Did soft money strengthen parties? Would the BCRA weaken parties? Were parties strong or weak before the passage of the BCRA? Much of the battle concerning the effect of the soft money ban and the BCRA’s threat to parties’ freedom of expression and association took place on shaky, contested terrain concerning the definition of party “strength.” Needless to say, a lack of agreement as to whether the BCRA will weaken parties is unsurprising when no one can agree on what defines a strong party or how to measure a party’s strength. I suggest here a few ways of defining party strength and evaluate the state of the parties before and after the BCRA according to these measures. Measuring party strength is difficult, however, not only because of the contested notion of “strength,” but also because of the multiple incarnations of America’s political parties. Parties exist vertically at every level of American federalism, horizontally in the executive branch and two houses of the legislature, and functionally in the formal party apparatuses and the less formal groupings of party adherents. Ultimately, I argue that the BCRA may have weakened parties according to some measures while strengthening it according to others and, perhaps more accurately, has shifted power in the party system away from some incarnations of the party and toward others. Finally, it may be the case that the soft money ban has had different effects on the two parties; contrary to the interests of its principal supporters and detractors, the ban may have made the Republican Party “stronger” and the Democratic Party “weaker.”