Has the U.S. Campaign Finance System Collapsed?

Introduction

This issue of The Forum is organized around the question, “Has the American campaign finance regime collapsed?” Thomas Mann, Ray La Raja, Michael Malbin, and Richard Briffault take four different and distinctive routes into examining that question on a grand scale. Next, David Magleby, Clyde Wilcox, and Richard Hasen immerse it in the events of 2008, evaluating the unprecedented fundraising by the presidential candidates and speculating about what this implies for future politics. Jennifer Steen, Susan Clark Muntean, and Michael Franz turn the question around, asking about the impact of campaign finance rules on other offices and other players, especially the organized interests. And Allison Hayward closes by asserting that it may not be worth worrying about these issues, through a focus on the practice of “bundling.”

In other articles, Laurel Elder attends to the widening partisan gender gap among office-seekers and its consequences for the representation of women. Charles Jones asks what a student of politics should derive from Robert Novak’s autobiography, The Prince of Darkness. Stacey Pelika and Gregg Frazer then offer very different takes on Diana Mutz, Hearing the Other Side. Lastly, in reviews germane to the central theme of this issue, Burdett Loomis comments on Richard Skinner’s More than Money, and Ken Mayer writes about John Sample’s The Fallacy of Campaign Finance Reform and Ray La Raja’s Small Change.