If money is speech, rich people get to talk louder. Duh.

I didn't care for the Supreme Court striking down even more campaign finance laws the other day. But, I'm not quite as apoplectic as you might expect. That's because the empirical research on this subject is fairly equivocal. Most elections aren't that close, for one thing. For another, large corporations don't like to make political enemies. Oddly enough, they tend to donate to both campaigns. And, for high profile elections, it would be hard for a corporation to buy enough air time to nullify the barrage of information that people would receive anyway, and as Obama showed, a high profile election can raise a lot of money through small donations.

Here's a pretty good analysis of the decision by a political scientist from Columbia.

As this guy points out, even under the original McCain-Feingold, 527 nonprofits were fairly unregulated, so if a corporation really had wanted to run ads, it already could have via a 527.

Most of the academic research I've read focuses on the influence of money on lawmaking, not on elections. I'm too lazy to go get my old syllabi and look up the citations for relevant research here, but the broad conclusion, if I remember correctly, is that money in politics can't really buy votes from a legislator, but it can buy access to them. Money works by making politicians more likely to listen to the lobbyist from the organization that donates than to the organization that doesn't. Combine this with the fact that rich interests are more likely to organize into groups in the first place than are poor interests, and one starts to get particularly concerned.

But, in general, the research in this area is pretty sparse, at least the stuff that I've been exposed to. That's because, although one can measure votes and donations fairly easily, it's very hard to establish causality in the model. Similarly with elections, it's hard to draw a firm causal connection between advertising and votes. Most voting research I've encountered focuses on things like socio-economic background and other determinants of voting behavior, not on the influence of advertising. All you can measure are opinion polls and something like advertising budgets or total airtime, and it's hard to isolate the influence of the advertising from other things. Some scholars have focused on political media, and they tend to conclude that people are susceptible to influence, but most of these have focused on news stories, not advertising per se, and they have been conducted as lab experiments, not real world conditions. The general conclusion is that political news has both a "priming" effect and a "framing" effect. Priming is taking a person's established preferences and inflating their importance, like if I liked guns, and then saw a bunch of stories about gun rights, i'd be more likely to base my vote decision on the candidates' gun rights positions. Framing is when people have sort of ambivalent or ambiguous policy preferences, and they receive some kind of communication that "frames" an issue in a way that elicits a feeling of certainty out of their ambiguity. Anyway...kind of a tangent there, but I'm just saying that advertising probably does have an impact on how people vote.

My suspicion is that money via advertising will have more influence as elections get lower in profile and more competetive. So, if there is a tight race for state representative in Bloomington, a well targeted ad by Cook Pharmica might have a lot of influence, but the same ad at the Gubernatorial level would have less influence. That's just my hunch. I'm sure certain people of my ilk are salivating over the chance to study this stuff over the next few years.

Oh, and by the way, this decision means that conservatives can no longer complain about "activist judges." If you hear them use that phrase, please fart on them.