John Stuart Mill believed it would be unethical to spend any money on his campaign for parliament in 1865. A century and a half later, elections have changed almost beyond recognition, yet the same ethical debates surrounding the role of money in politics remain. Writing almost exactly 100 years after Mill had expressed his view, political scientist Stein Rokkan quipped that in elections “votes count but resources decide” (Rokkan, 1966, p. 105). It has long been the received wisdom that this is the reality in so-called established democracies, a situation that John Girling has described in terms of a “misfit” between democracy and capitalism (Girling, 1997). This topic is therefore a salient one for democratic theory, although it is noteworthy that a disproportionate amount of the theoretical discussion of campaign finance has taken place in the empirical context of a single country—the United States—which has rules and traditions of political finance that are relatively unusual among democracies. As a result, the broader links between political donations and democratic theory remain underexplored. It is often held that political donations are a legitimate form of political participation, reflecting norms of freedom of expression and freedom of association. Making a monetary contribution to a party, candidate, or political organization of choice may seem like a reasonable alternative for those who want to “do something” but are time poor. The problem from a democratic perspective is that, above a very low level of universal affordability, citizens have differential ability to contribute, which means that any contribution of a typical real-world value represents a far larger cost to some citizens than to others. The impact of these perverse effects of private money on electoral politics is one of the reasons why two-thirds of states fund electoral campaigns from the public purse and three-fifths provide direct funding to parties (IDEA, 2018), numbers that have grown in recent years (Koss, 2010; van Biezen, 2008). The uneasy cohabitation in really existing democracies between unequal economic resources and the norm of political equality is generally accepted among political practitioners as a necessary evil, given the cost of modern electoral campaigns. The practical electoral arrangements of contemporary democratic states virtually all reflect mixed models combining public and private financing, and the majority of democracies place some limits on political donations (IDEA, 2014, 2018). No democracies currently ban private donations, though in some the cap is relatively restrictive; for example, in Estonia, the maximum donation is €1200 and in Belgium €2000 per annum (IDEA, 2018). In the era of cheap and virtually universal internet access, dense media coverage of politics, and widespread public funding of political processes, there is scope for revisiting this question and exploring whether under nonideal conditions there is still a justified role for the private funding of electoral campaigns. The aim of this analysis is to assess the role of private money in electoral politics against core criteria of democratic theory, drawing on empirical experience from across the range of contemporary democracies. My conclusion, which is consistent with classic liberal, deliberative, republican, social, and communitarian understandings of democracy, is that private funding is incompatible with democratic principles on two grounds: it risks resulting in political inequality among citizens and it threatens the judgmental autonomy of elected representatives and those who would seek election to representative bodies. I argue that parties, candidates, and other political organizations should be funded instead from the public purse, and from private contributions in the form of flat party membership or supporter fees, or a system whereby the state gives vouchers of equal value to all citizens, and citizens can then donate the value of their voucher to the political object of their choice. While there is discussion in the field of democratic theory that is devoted specifically to campaign finance (Beitz, 1989; Christiano, 2012a; Hopkin, 2004; Pelletier, 2014; Thompson, 1987, 2002), the normative study of this topic tends to be dominated by American jurisprudence, which frames the debate within the narrow confines of U.S. constitutional law. The intended contribution of the current analysis is thus (a) to broaden out this debate and recenter it in relation to key democratic theory concepts, specifically democratic rights and political equality as understood with reference to systems of political finance common in established democracies across the globe; (b) to specify seven distinct ways in which private finance can violate political equality (and hence seven finance-related phenomena that must be prevented in order to preserve political equality); and (c) to develop an argument about the relationship between private finance and judgmental autonomy that concludes that payments by voters to politicians should be treated in the same way as payments by politicians to voters. The discussion will be limited to the democratic ethics of electoral finance, defined as money and in-kind resources used to fund electoral campaigns. Money inveigles its way into politics in a multitude of ways, and this analysis does not pretend to be relevant to all of them. My argument against private political donations assumes political equality to be fundamental to democracy. It also embraces the nonideal conditions of social and economic inequality, vulnerability to manipulate and be manipulated, and heterogeneous citizen adherence to democratic norms. The argument starts in the first part with the case against private electoral finance on the grounds that it is a violation of political equality among citizens. The second part offers a critique of private finance as a violation of the judgmental autonomy of electoral representatives and candidates for public office. The third part assesses common justifications for private finance on the grounds of freedom of association and freedom of expression. The fourth part considers possible objections to the perspective set out here based on empirical evidence of the effects of different electoral finance regimes found in contemporary democracies, while a fifth part concludes. In this section, I explore what is entailed in the principle of political equality in elections and the various ways in which private electoral finance may be held to violate that principle. Two main types of violation are identified: unequal consideration of citizen interests (pertaining to political elites) and unequal opportunity to persuade others (pertaining to citizens). These are elaborated in terms of seven specific negative effects that private finance can have on political equality in institutional contexts typical of contemporary democracies. The political equality of citizens is at the core of democracy. There is a relatively widespread consensus among democratic theorists working in different traditions that all citizens have an equal right to take part in the making of political decisions, and a right to equal consideration by the public institutions (e.g., Christiano, 2012b; Dahl, 1989; Dworkin, 2000; Pettit, 2012; Philips, 1991; Walzer, 1983; Wilson, 2019; Young, 2000). The reasoning of these authors is broadly consistent with the view that the bargain at the heart of liberal democracy is the toleration of economic inequality in society, provided political equality is maintained. Discussions of the negative effects of private political finance are often framed in terms of corruption. But corruption understood in a narrow legalistic sense may not be the best frame, as it does not always succeed in fully encompassing the problem. Corruption is commonly defined as the abuse of public trust for private gain (or some variation thereon) (e.g., Girling, 1997; Johnston, 2014; Rose-Ackerman, 1999; Rothstein & Varraich, 2017). The politics of many democracies have been punctuated in recent years by political party funding scandals involving the allegedly corrupt use of money to finance election campaigns, from the U.K. Ecclestone Affair in the 1990s to the Alternative for Germany donation scandal of 2017–2020. Yet the frequency of the empirical link between private finance and corruption is not evidence that there is a necessary logical or causal connection between the two. In the U.S. context, the Supreme Court's Buckley v. Valeo ruling of 1976 found that preventing (the appearance of) corruption was a legitimate reason for restricting campaign finance, and this was a justification given for allowing limits on campaign donations to stand. Commenting on the academic debate provoked by this case, Strauss maintains that “those who say they are concerned about corruption are actually concerned about two other things: inequality, and the nature of democratic politics” (Strauss, 1994, p. 1370). Abstracting away from legal definitions of what is corrupt, the problem with corruption from a democratic perspective is that it generates political inequality. A criminal who bribes a judge, a businessperson who bribes a politician to vote a certain way, a construction company that bribes a bureaucrat in order to be awarded a contract, and a motorist who bribes a policeperson to avoid being given a speeding ticket are all benefitting from a breach of the neutrality norm that the public officeholder in question is meant to respect. Not all political inequality takes the form of corruption, but corruption virtually always enacts political inequality. If campaign donations induce politicians and parties to alter their policy positions or otherwise treat citizens differentially depending on the amount of money citizens have given to support an election campaign, this is a violation of the principle of political equality, whether or not it falls into legal or normative definition of corruption (Thompson, 2002, p. 109). Arguments about campaign finance that are framed in terms of corruption are thus to a great extent red herrings; what is legally corrupt in one context will not be legally corrupt in another context, as laws vary across jurisdictions, but the actions in both contexts may be problematic for the same reason that corruption is problematic if they generate political inequality. There is also a second way in which private finance violates political equality: differential ability to donate or spend on behalf of a campaign affords citizens unequal opportunity to persuade others; in other words, it is a violation of the principle of equality of opportunity for political influence, or the principle that “people who are equally motivated and equally able to play this role, by influencing binding collective decisions, ought to have equal chances to exercise such influence” (Cohen, 2001; cf. Brighouse, 1996; Christiano, 2012a; Pettit, 2012, pp. 209–211). If citizens have differential ability to influence politics due to variations in personal wealth, they are not equal in their opportunity to contribute to the political process through agenda-setting and debate. This is true whether or not the contributions in question generate political change. It is also true of small donations, if a large number of small donations come disproportionately from more affluent citizens. For example, if there is a cap on donations of $100/€100 per annum, but only citizens with an annual salary of at least $40,000/€40,000 can afford to give that much, then parties have an incentive to adjust their policies to cater to people earning over $40,000/€40,000. If only 70% of the electorate has an income over $40,000/€40,000 a year, then parties have less incentive to pay attention to the interests of the 30% of the electorate that is unlikely to make donations. In as much as the more affluent will undoubtedly have policy references and positions on issues that differ systematically from those of the less affluent, even relatively modest donations are likely to bias the positions taken by parties/candidates. This argument is compatible with the existence of influence differentials that derive from variations in interest in politics. Dworkin argues that the distribution of resources should be “ambition sensitive” but not “endowment sensitive” (Dworkin, 2000, p. 89). The same logic can be applied to political influence (even if Dworkin himself does not make this connection). If someone cares passionately about politics and they want to influence political outcomes, there should be no limit on their ability to do this through persuasion, which is a discursive act. Those affected by a ban on private donations could, and most likely would, avail themselves of discursive modes of influence. Those channels of influence are roughly egalitarian, in that differential access to the internet, to time, and to discursive resources is not nearly as pronounced as differential access to money. If someone cares enough about politics to try to influence it, they can rearrange their life such that they have time to blog, tweet, and campaign face-to-face to advance the cause they support. The point is sometimes made that more educated people have a discursive advantage in politics in that they are able to make more persuasive arguments, but recent experience suggests that this may be an academic fantasy. Plenty of poorly educated people have advanced political claims that may not conform to the logical standards of university professors, but can, in the age of social media, reach out to and convince a very large number of people. Prohibitions on private finance do not interfere with the right of citizens to persuade others; they simply limit this influence to discursive tools. Finally, the effective requirement for candidates in some jurisdictions to draw on private resources to fund their election campaigns can lead to inequalities in the ability of citizens to put themselves forward for election to representative assemblies (Cagé, 2018; Lessig, 2015). Not only does this impinge on equality of opportunity to contest elections, but it can also have consequences for the adequacy of representation. When candidates are disproportionately drawn from the richer groups in society, this will lead to a demographic skew in elected assemblies that could potentially bias policymaking in favor of the better off, even in the absence of pressure on representatives to please donors. In sum, citizens have differential ability to contribute money to parties and candidates. If the ability of parties and candidates to achieve their ends depends in part on raising money from private donations, their activities will be skewed toward those most able to contribute. This is true whether or not donations are capped at a moderate amount such as $100/€100, as a cap set at a level that makes donation far more affordable for some than for others will result in contributions coming disproportionately from the affluent, and the views, needs, and expectations of the affluent are bound to differ systematically from those of the poor. Only if donations are limited to a level at which everyone can afford to contribute will differential political influence be eliminated; at this level (say $10/€10), it makes more sense to convert payments into flat membership or supporter fees. Party position effect: Donations to political parties (or the anticipation of such donations) might potentially sway the policy positions parties take, or the extent to which they prioritize certain policies over others and make greater efforts to get some issues onto the political agenda. Political recruitment effect: The differential ability of prospective candidates to raise campaign funds might deter talented individuals from seeking elected office. Representative behavior effect: Donations to the campaigns of individual elected representatives (or the anticipation of such donations) might, in relevant electoral systems, influence the issues raised in the legislature by these representatives, the committees they choose to sit on, or their voting behavior. Executive behavior effect: Donations to the parties of government ministers or to the campaigns of presidential candidates (or the anticipation of such donations) might, where such donations are possible, influence donor access to members of the executive and the opportunity to shape policy at the stage where options are formulated and selected. Mobilization effect: Donations to election campaigns might influence the ability of candidates and parties to mobilize electors to go to the polls. Conversion effect: Donations to election campaigns might influence the ability of candidates and parties to persuade voters to change their view on policy issues relevant to the election, to change the priority they accord to different issues, and/or to change their vote choice. Legitimation effect: Donations to political parties and candidates might enable political elites to reshape, through their campaign material and other political discourse, what are considered to be acceptable policy positions. All seven effects have in common their ability to reshape political agendas, public deliberation, and decision-making so as to benefit donors, and thereby undermine citizens’ equal right to exercise their freedoms of expression, association, and political participation. Any democratic defense of private campaign finance would need to argue against all seven effects, and it is unclear that any defense so far advanced has met that requirement. It is also worth noting that the effects on political elites are largely structural features of donation regimes: they may well function even in the absence of actual donations, as the possibility of donations can be expected to condition the choices that parties and elected representatives make about their policy priorities, positions, and activities. A somewhat different argument against the use of private finance in democratic elections is that it constitutes a threat to the deliberative process through which elected representatives and parties debate policies. Autonomy of political judgment, and in particular, the expression of judgments in deliberative fora, is a crucial component of democratic public reason (Christiano, 1996; Kolodny, 2014, p. 310; Pitkin, 1967; Rawls, 1997). Representatives whose views have been conditioned by private donations can be expected to be less willing to give accurate reasons for their positions and be less open to deliberation (Sunstein, 1997, p. 25), and donations may thereby hinder autonomous political judgment (Christiano, 1996, pp. 222, 257; Strauss, 1994; Thompson, 1987, pp. 111–116). The policy positions that politicians are expected to advance vary with the model of democracy under consideration—according to a Burkean model, elected officeholders are expected to promote the collective good, whereas in the party accountability model, politicians advance the interests of the supporters of their party or those of their constituents. Regardless of the model adopted, it is not unreasonable to expect democratic politicians to justify the positions they take, to deliberate, and to use their autonomous judgment to promote the interests they have been elected to represent. If a legislator is aware that they need to appeal for funding to fewer people than they need to appeal for votes, they have an incentive to shape their expressed judgments so as to cater to prospective donors rather than to all voters. And if the judgments they express in deliberation and voting are biased by pecuniary considerations, this is a challenge to public reason (Rawls, 1997). Thus, Rawls argues that “Public deliberation must be made possible, recognized as a basic feature of democracy, and set free from the curse of money” (Rawls, 1997, p. 772). The alternative is an impoverishment of democratic debate and a distortion of representation bearing a structural similarity to that which results from payments by politicians to voters, commonly known as “vote-buying.” In 91.1% of the world's countries, it is illegal for a candidate or party to pay a voter for their vote (IDEA, 2018); this is because the purchase of votes substitutes for genuine programmatic preference expression of a vote that is cast in exchange for a particularistic benefit, and it undermines political equality by advantaging those who are in positions to vote (Birch, 2011; Satz, 2010; Schaffer, 2007; Stokes et al., 2013). These considerations are sufficient that the market in votes is “blocked” (to use Debra Satz's term) in democracies. This logic can be extended to private campaign donations, as donations have the same relationship to their recipients as payments for votes have to voters. Consideration of the way in which vote-buying is commonly regulated will help to draw out the implications of this analogy. The concepts of voter “treating,” bribery, and “undue influence” were developed originally in English case law to describe situations where people employed positions of power to exert inappropriate influence over the less powerful; in the context of elections, bribery is typically pecuniary, and undue influence is coercive (Watt, 2006, pp. 124–125). One might query the applicability of these concepts to political elites, yet there is considerable empirical evidence that the need for cash to compete in donation-fueled elections often places politicians and parties in established democracies in situations where they are vulnerable to pressure from donors to alter their political positions (as has been documented in numerous empirical cases, e.g., Alexander & Shiratori, 1994; Gokcekus et al., 2017; Gunlicks, 1993; McMenamin, 2013; Stratmann, 1991; Thompson, 1987; Williams, 2000), and that policymakers are more responsive to better-off groups in the electorate who are more likely to make donations (Bartels, 2008; Gilens, 2012). In newer democracies, political elites are at risk of capture by powerful economic interests that wield considerable control over their political clients (Hellman & Kaufmann et al., 2000; Rothstein & Varraich, 2017); in such cases, it is no exaggeration to speak of politicians as being in a vulnerable subordinate position with respect to private sector interests, in the same way that rural dwellers in traditional societies are often vulnerable to pressure from vote-buying local patrons. When influence is said to be “undue,” this is a claim about the impact of money on the objectivity or quality of autonomous political judgment, in that the exchange of money for votes induces preference falsification on the part of voters. Voters do not change their minds, just their votes. Inappropriate influence on a candidate or party would result when that candidate or party altered their policy positions in order to solicit campaign donations. Inasmuch as democratic party competition relies on parties offering policy packages that are attractive to sectors of the electorate and competing for votes on this basis (Downs, 1957), incentives that systematically bias the positions taken by one or more parties can be expected to skew the party system in favor of the interests represented by funders. Political systems that rely on proof of illicit influence to pinpoint corruption or other forms of wrongdoing pose significant evidential challenges. In practice, it is often not feasible to identify bias or distortion of this type, though this is no justification for not seeking to protect against it. Efforts to affect political outcomes may fail, and the recipients of a donation may not be entirely conscious of the extent to which their policy offers are shaped by donations. A grandmother who donates a low denomination banknote to a candidate standing for election to her local elected assembly can safely be said to have no intention of thereby altering the policy position of the candidate or influencing the actions that person may take when elected to office. If she donates a larger sum, she may do so with the intention of influencing that person's policies, but she may be wrong, as the amount she is offering may be insufficient. Likewise, a candidate eager to be elected to office may craft a policy offer that she believes will appeal to wealthy donors in her area, but she may fail to attract the donations she seeks. It is also empirically difficult to trace the causal impact of a donation, as that impact may well be circuitous. Burke differentiates between what might be termed the indirect, semidirect, and direct forms of impact that campaign donations can have on the behavior of recipients. The most indirect form of impact is the “distortion” of campaign contributions, which “do not reflect the balance of public opinion and thus distort policymaking through their influence on elections” (what I describe above as the conversion effect); semidirect impact is “monetary influence,” where officeholders “perform their duties with monetary considerations in mind” but no explicit deal is made (what I describe above as the representative behavior effect); direct impact is quid pro quo exchanges of money for votes in the legislature (or other action) (also a representative behavior effect) (Burke, 1997, p. 131). On the face of it, more indirect forms of influence might appear to be normatively less objectionable. But Burke argues that the standard by which campaign finance behavior should be judged is not the extent to which influence is direct or indirect—which is irrelevant in normative terms—but the impact that behavior has on the electoral and legislative processes (Burke, 1997, p. 138). I would argue that the standard should be the potential impact such behavior could have on the legislative process and the opportunity to skew judgmental autonomy, by analogy with the institutional approach to vote-buying that is common in democracies. An important characteristic of bans on vote-buying is their blanket nature. In many contexts, voters take the money that a candidate pays them, and they nevertheless vote for their preferred candidate; the privacy of the polling booth goes some way toward insulating them from sanctions that might arise were they discovered not to have kept their side of the vote-purchase deal. Nevertheless, attempts at vote-buying are typically illegal even when they do not alter vote choice and there is thus no quid pro quo; there is no onus on prosecutors to show that a voter has in fact been influenced by the provision of a reward to deem vote-buying laws to have been breached. Given the practical impossibility of distinguishing between a donation that simply helps a politician to put forward a predetermined stance and one that alters that stance, private campaign donations are normatively problematic for the same reason that efforts to buy votes are problematic, even if quid pro quo cannot be ascertained. Moreover, outlawing vote-buying is not viewed as an inappropriate infringement of the free speech of candidates, parties, or voters, though the case for this certainly could be made in the same terms as the case is made for allowing campaign finance donations on grounds of freedom of expression. Most contemporary democracies therefore operate under electoral rules that are logically inconsistent, as they outlaw donations by politicians to voters with no guarantee of political reward, yet they allow donations by voters to politicians with no guarantee of political reward. If donations to one type of electoral actor are illicit from a democratic point of view, then so are donations to another type, as both types of actors are potentially vulnerable to democratically inappropriate inducements. Objections to private money in politics are commonly met with the following riposte: but what about the rights of freedom of association and freedom of expression? This section considers these rights in relation to campaign finance. A strain running throughout virtually all versions of modern democratic theory is the idea that democratic politics is built on the bedrock of free and open debate, discussion, and grassroots organization that serve to develop and test ideas deliberatively before the aggregative procedures of elections are employed to select leaders. Where freedom to gather and exchange views is hampered, it cannot be said that voters face meaningful choices at the polls. Those who see private finance as an important means of promoting freedom of association and expression typically defend it on these grounds, though as I shall seek to demonstrate in this section, such arguments are often flawed in the context of electoral politics that is grounded in the principal of political equality. The freedom to form and take part in associations to pursue political ends is relevant to electoral finance as this right may be used to justify donations to political parties and other political groupings such as American political action committees, Japanese koenkais (local support groups), French commités de soutien, or trade unions that support political parties in many jurisdictions. Key questions relevant in this context are whether spending can be viewed as a form of association, and whether the state can legitimately intervene to regulate the internal activities of parties and other voluntary groups. That the right to associate should entail the right to donate to one's association of choice follows from the fact that beyond the most rudimentary activities, any form of association requires resources, and the most realistic source of resources is the members who have come together to form the association. Even in states with well-developed public funding regimes (which include the vast majority of democracies), parties must typically meet certain threshold requirements—calculated in terms of vote or seat p