Campaign Finance and Political Polarization: When Purists Prevail

Front matter

Campaign Finance and Political Polarization ^%

When

Purists Prevail

Chapter 1. Campaign Finance Laws, Purists, and Pragmatists

Who Benefits? 1 Chapter 2. The Ideological Wellsprings of Campaign Money 36 Chapter 3. Who Gets Campaign Money and Why Rules Matter 60 Chapter 4. Ideological Polarization in State Legislatures 87 Chapter 5. The Hydraulics of Campaign Money 108 Chapter 6. The Future of Reform: Build Canals, Not Dams 134

Notes 161 Bibliography 173

List of Figures and Tables

Figures

Figure 1.1 Limits on Contributions to Parties from Various Sources 27

Figure 1.2 Limits on Contributions to Candidates from Various Sources 29

Figure 1.3 Per Capita Fundraising by State Parties, 2012 Elections 30

Figure 2.1 Ideology of Registered Voters, State Donors, Federal Donors 46

Figure 2.2 Issue Positions of Donors and Other Adults 47

Figure 2.3 Donor Ideology Based on Giving to Candidates versus Parties 49

Figure 2.4 Proportion of Donors Who Give to Parties, Candidates, or Groups, Based on Their Ideology 50

Figure 2.5 Donor Perceptions of Party and Candidates, Based on Donor Ideological Self-Placement 53

Figure 2.6 Contributions to Parties Based on State Contribution Laws (2010) 56

Figure 2.7 Limits on Candidate Donations and Polarization among Party Donors (2010) 58

Figure 3.1 Source of State Legislative Candidate Funds for 2005-2006 Elections 64 x List of Figures and Tables Figure 3.2 Expected Contribution Patterns among Four Types of Donors 68

Figure 3.3 How Parties and Groups Distribute Their Funds across the Ideological Spectrum (1996-2010) 71

Figure 3.4 Proportion of All Funds Received by Different Types of Candidates (2005-2006) 73

Figure 3.5 Fundraising Sources for Incumbents (2005-2006) 74 Figure 3.6 Fundraising Sources for Challengers (2005-2006) 75

Figure 3.7 Fundraising Sources for Open-Seat Candidates (2005-2006) 76

Figure 3.8 Relationship between Incumbent Ideology and Proportion of Funds Coming from Different Sources (1996-2010) 78

Figure 3.9 Effects of Party Contribution Limits on Candidates’ Fundraising Portfolios 80

Figure 3.10 Relationship between Ideology and Candidate Reliance on Party Funds (2006-2010) 82

Figure 4.1 State Legislator and District Ideologies 94

Figure 4.2 Ideological Distribution of Legislators in States With and Without Limits on Party Fundraising/Contributions 98

Figure 4.3 Ideological Distribution of Legislators in Professional State Legislatures With and Without Limits on Party Fundraising/ Contributions 99

Figure 4.4 Partisan Ideological Overlap in States With and Without Party- Centered Campaign Finance Laws (1996-2008) 1o01

Figure 4.5 Projected Levels of Polarization Based on Party Finance Limits 105

Figure 4.6 Average Increase in Polarization in Professional Legislatures Based on Laws Limiting Party Contributions/Fundraising (1997-2007) 106

Figure 5.1 Independent Expenditures Relative to Total Contributions in States Depending on Party Contribution Laws (2010—2012) 123

List of Figures and Tables xi Figure 5.2 Independent Spending by Groups in States With and Without Party Limits (2006—2012) 127

Figure 6.1 What Goal Is Most Important for Campaign Finance Reform? Average Rank Ordering of Preferences among Respondents (Scale: a high of 1toalowofs) 156

Figure 6.2 Support for Contribution Limits to Candidates for Different Types of Contributors 158

Tables

Table 1.1 Comparing Per Capita Contributions to Parties (2011—2012 Election Cycle) 32

Table 1.2 Comparing States With and Without Limits on Political Parties 33

Table 2.1 Campaign Donors versus American Adults 44

Table 2.2 Characteristics of Donors in States with Low Contribution Limits versus No Limits 55

Table 3.1 Differing Priorities of Political Donor Groups 66 Table 3.2 How Parties and Groups Distribute Contributions 72

Table 3.3 Factors Affecting Where Incumbent Senators Receive Campaign Funding 83

Table 4.1 Average Legislative Polarization and Change (1997-2010) 93

Table 4.2 Models Estimating Effects of Campaign Finance Limits on Polarization in State Legislative Chambers (1993-2013) 104

Preface

The public intensely dislikes how campaigns are financed in the United States. We can understand why. The system of private financing seems rigged to favor special interests and wealthy donors. Much of the reform community has responded by calling for tighter restrictions on private financing of elections to push the system toward “small donor democracy” and various forms of public financing. These strategies seem to make sense and, in principle, we are not opposed to them.

But our research and professional experience as political scientists have led us to speculate that these populist approaches to curtailing money in politics might not be alleviating, but contributing to, contemporary problems in the political system, including the bitter partisan stand-offs and apparent insensitivity of elected officials to the concerns of ordinary Americans that appear to characterize the current state of U.S. politics. Indeed, we began to sense that the populist approach to campaign finance reform may reflect a larger pattern of populist assumptions about how democracy works that have in fact led to ill-conceived reforms in other areas, as Bruce Cain argues in Democracy More or Less (2014). We wondered if anticorruption rules, which purportedly make the wealthy less influential, were in fact doing the opposite: making the system even less responsive to broad constituencies and rendering political discourse even more acerbic than it would otherwise be.

Our hunch was that prevailing approaches to reform may reinforce the influence of a small fraction of citizens and groups that already dominate the financing of politics. How could this be? One plausible reason is that such donors already have the means and motive to contrive ways to get around the most stringent elements of campaign finance laws. But there may be more to the story. We have observed that there is an essential element xiv Preface missing from most campaign finance reform strategies: the realization that restrictions on money in politics actually enfeeble political parties.

Our growing conviction that most contemporary campaign reform initiatives have undervalued the roles that political parties play in U.S. politics led us to undertake the research project that culminated in this book. In fact, a vast body of research on democratic politics indicates that parties play several vital roles, including aggregating interests, guiding voter choices, and holding politicians accountable with meaningful partisan labels. Yet this research seems to have been ignored in the design of post-Watergate reforms.

‘The consequence, as we show in this book, is the continuation of a shift begun in the early 20th century from party-centered politics to candidate-centered politics. The counterintuitive result has been a system in which interest groups and intensely ideological—and wealthy—citizens play a disproportionately large role in financing candidates for public office. This dynamic has direct implications for many of the problems facing American government today, including ideological polarization and political gridlock. ‘The campaign finance system is certainly not the only source of polarization and gridlock, but we think it is an important part of the story. In this book, we tell this story by considering the rich variation in campaign finance laws in the 50 American states and comparing their effects on political discourse and elections.

Our motivation to write this book reflects both our scholarly interests and our concerns as citizens. We take seriously the urging of the leadership in our profession, particularly reflected in the American Political Science Association (APSA), to make political science relevant for broader societal concerns. In the past decade APSA presidential addresses have called for greater attention to problems associated with inequality, partisan polarization, and the dysfunction of the American political system. This book addresses some of these issues. We embarked on the project not simply to solve a “puzzle” in the scholarship about financing in the party system, but to understand how campaign finance laws affect elections and governance, with an eye toward making useful policy recommendations.

Our work developed from emergent research about the dynamics of partisan polarization and new conceptions of American political parties, particularly those formulated by a group we call the UCLA school. The ideas for this book advanced from ongoing conversations and blog exchanges (via the Monkey Cage and Election Law Blog) with our colleagues who study and/or practice election law, including Steve Ansolabehere, Bob Bauer, Bob Biersack, Rob Boatright, Adam Bonica, Bruce Cain, Guy-Uriel Charles, Tony Corrado, Diana Dwyre, John Fortier, Michael Franz, Erika Fowler,

Preface xv

Ben Ginsberg, Keith Hamm, Rick Hasen, Paul Herrnson, Eitan Hersh, Ruth Jones, Dave Karpf, Robin Kolodny, Michael Malbin, Tom Mann, Seth Masket, Ken Mayer, Eric McGhee, Sid Milkis, Jeff Milyo, Nate Persily, Rick Pildes, Trevor Potter, Lynda Powell, John Samples, and John Sides.

We also benefited significantly from the leadership of forward-thinking foundations and policy centers that have been trying to address emergent problems of governance in the United States. Together the leaders in these organizations created a forum for robust dialogue on political reform. This group includes Joe Goldman of the Democracy Fund, who initiated a round of discussions that convened academics, practitioners, and reformers. These excellent forums were led by John Fortier of the Bipartisan Policy Center and Nate Persily of Stanford University Law School. Above all, we would like to thank Daniel Stid and Larry Kramer of the Hewlett Foundation for providing the support that made this project feasible, as well as program officers Jean Parvin Bordewich and Kelly Born.

The timing for conducting this research was fortunate. We benefited from an extraordinary amount of new data recently made available at the state level. We greatly appreciate the dedication of the people who gathered these data and their generosity in sharing them with us. The National Institute on Money in State Politics, through Ed Bender and Denise Roth Barber, provided abundant campaign finance data; Keith Hamm and Jeff Milyo both shared their data on campaign finance laws, as did Jennie Drage Bowser at the National Conference of State Legislatures; Boris Shor and Nolan McCarty provided an immensely useful dataset on the ideological scores of state legislators. Carl Klarner offers an invaluable resource to scholars by posting his historical data on election outcomes in state legislatures. We thank Neil Reiff for arranging interviews with leaders of state party committees.

We appreciate the enthusiasm for this project from our editor Melody Herr at the University of Michigan Press. She has built up an impressive library of books on campaign finance and elections, and we are honored to have our work included among this select group of publications. We would also like to thank our colleagues at the University of Massachusetts— Amherst who are part of the American Politics Research Group and who read significant portions of this work, including Maryann Barakso, Bruce Desmarais, Seth Goldman, Rahsaan Maxwell, Tatishe Nteta, Jesse Rhodes, and Libby Sharrow. Bruce Cain at Stanford also read the entire manuscript, provided valuable comments, and gave us a chance to present our work to a wide-ranging group of scholars and practitioners at Stanford’s Program on American Democracy in Comparative Perspective. Finally, we thank xvi Preface our graduate student Wouter Van Erve for keeping up with our unending requests for data, Ed Murphy for his wise copyediting, production editors Kevin Rennells and Nicholle Lutz, and political science department staff Trish Bachand and Michelle Gongalves for their support in helping to bring this book to fruition.

All of the data and program files necessary to replicate the results from this book are available at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/laraja_schaffner.

Raymond J. La Raja Brian F. Schaffner Amherst, Massachusetts, October 2015

CHAPTER I

Campaign Finance Laws, Purists, and Pragmatists: Who Benefits?

Politics in Washington appears hopelessly polarized. The widening ideological gap in the U.S. Congress has received most of the attention (McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal 2006; Rohde 1991), but similar dynamics have been playing out in many state legislatures (Shor and McCarty 2011). While the consequences of such polarization are not always clear, there seems little doubt of one effect: partisan rancor in legislatures has increased dramatically. In recent decades we have observed an unusual degree of policy gridlock and the deterioration of Congress as a deliberative body (Mann and Ornstein 2012). A complete lack of compromise appears to block government from acting on pressing issues such as immigration or tax reform, which are widely acknowledged in both parties as ripe for policy transformation.

The problems do not stop there. A strong case has been made that policy gridlock exacerbates wealth inequality through a basic failure to adjust policies to new economic and demographic realities (Hacker and Pierson 2010; McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal 2006). Perhaps most worrisome for the long-term health of American democracy is the possibility that our institutions do not adequately represent citizens, with parties standing for highly ideological policies that are at odds with the preferences of the vast majority of voters (Fiorina, Abrams, and Pope 2005).

Why We Write

As close observers of American politics, we worry about polarization and its potential impact on the democratic process. That is why we are writing this book. We see no magic remedy for this problem, but we can help identify underlying causes, which might lead to fruitful reforms. Our experience in analyzing elections and governing suggests to us that a link might exist between the ideological distancing of the parties and the weakened state of party organizations in the United States. In an era when money is an essential electoral resource, party organizations have often struggled to finance politics because campaign finance laws and court jurisprudence constrain political parties more tightly than they limit interest groups or individual donors.

Party-Centered versus Candidate-Centered Financing

Given our concerns, the question posed in this book is a practical one, although it is informed by theory and research about political parties. Would a party-centered campaign finance system improve our politics? In other words, we ask whether rules giving political parties more freedom to raise and spend money on candidates would attenuate the excesses of ideological polarization between the major political parties.

We present our detailed response to this question in the remaining chapters of this book. Our argument is that financially strong party organizations should reduce party polarization. It may seem odd that making parties stronger organizationally would abate their programmatic intensity, but we will present evidence that this is so. As we explain in the following chapters, party organizations behave somewhat differently from other political actors in the campaign finance system. Specifically, parties are the sole political organizations whose primary goal is to win elections. We will argue that this unique characteristic forces parties to exercise a moderating effect on those who win office. One of the main thrusts of our argument will be that the introduction of party-friendly campaign finance laws would moderate the distancing of the major political parties in Congress and the states.

Aside from seeming paradoxical, our position may not be popular. Political parties are not the most admired institutions in American life. According to a recent poll by Rassmussen, 53 percent of U.S. voters think that neither party in Congress is the party of the American people.’ The disdain for political parties is an American tradition dating to the Founding and expressed anxiously by George Washington in his Farewell Address; Washington admonished his compatriots to shun the “incongruous projects of faction,” which often serve “a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community.”

Despite Washington's urgent call to avoid organizing by faction, political parties soon became mainstays of American democracy. However, their place in the political culture took a decidedly negative turn during the Progressive era of the early 20th century when political reformers recast political parties as institutions that damaged democracy and governance (Milkis 2009; Milkis and Mileur 1999; Rosenblum 2008). To this day, the image of the corrupt party machine lives on, even during an era when machines and party bosses are rarities. Many citizens continue to visualize these quasipublic organizations as doing business behind closed doors and interposing themselves between voters and candidates in ways that thwart the will of the people. The idea of empowering these organizations, which have been the object of distrust during the past 100 years or so, may seem uncomfortable to many readers.

Our position may also be unpopular because our findings suggest that increasing or entirely removing limits on how much money party organizations can raise and spend would be a step toward reducing polarization. As we will see in chapter 6, this is quite at odds with the opinion of a significant segment of the public, which supports the imposition of low contribution limits on groups such as political parties—or even the prohibition of contributions by such groups entirely. This opinion reflects the understandable fear that allowing parties to raise a lot of money will increase the potential for corruption, or at least afford moneyed interests an undue influence contrary to the public interest. There is the perception that allowing parties to take large donations increases the risk that wealthy individuals and special interests will have their way in statehouses across the nation. This very concern was at the heart of arguments for Congress to pass the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA) of 2002, better known as the McCain-Feingold Act, which banned so-called party “soft money.”°

We are sympathetic to such concerns and we acknowledge that our book cannot completely address the problem of corruption and undue influence.* However, we will make the argument that the intense focus of campaign finance policy on preventing corruption has blinded policymakers to the broader effects of these policies on the political system. We will argue that a zealous anticorruption approach can lead to unintended negative consequences. We will make the case that this approach reflects an overly romanticized view that democracy is solely about individual citizens having a direct and equal voice in public affairs (Pildes 2015). A less naive view is that democracy functions primarily through intermediary organizations—like parties, interest groups, and the media—that help inform, mobilize, and channel citizen preferences (Cain 2014). We make the point that the anticorruption strategy, which seeks to “level down” contributions through low limits, has had the ironic effect of pushing political money toward obscurely named groups, sometimes called “super PACs,” that now pervade federal and state campaigns. We are concerned because such groups lack transparency and accountability. But we have another major concern.

Campaign Finance Reforms and Polarization

A major hypothesis in this book is that laws that push money away from party organizations to partisan interest groups have accentuated the highly polarized political environment in many American states. We expect too that our findings can legitimately be generalized beyond the states to the U.S. Congress, where many of the same polarizing forces are clearly at work. Through our discussion of the research and observations supporting this hypothesis, we hope to broaden the policy debate beyond a narrow focus on preventing corruption, without repudiating longstanding efforts to maintain integrity and equality in the political system through campaign finance reform.

Our study depends on a system-level approach that is attentive to the broader flows of political money rather than the one-to-one exchanges that occupy most research on the political influence of donors. Instead of studying the dyadic relationship between donors and officeholders (e.g., to see if money buys votes or effort), we propose a holistic framework that applies itself to what is referred to as the “hydraulics” of campaign finance rules. In our view, regulations do not tend to keep money out of politics but mostly redirect its currents through different channels. We have mentioned the super PACs that raise and spend millions of dollars outside the formal structure of campaign finance laws.’ These groups arose, in part, because the limits on contributions to candidates and parties were tightened with the BCRA of 2002. Money constrained from flowing directly to candidates and parties was squeezed in another direction.

Historical data also suggest that the relationship between campaign finance laws and campaign spending in U.S. elections is surprisingly inelastic. One study shows a roughly linear relationship over time between GDP and election-related spending, suggesting in economic terms that campaign spending is akin to a consumption activity (Ansolabehere, deFigueiredo, and Snyder 2003). In other words, spending is relatively immune to laws that attempt to restrain it. Campaign finance laws may change the paths that money takes, but the total amount in the system appears to depend on other factors, such as the availability of money, the electoral stakes, and political competition (Hogan 2000).

The crux of our argument is that, although laws fail to stop the flow of money into politics, they do affect the channels through which it flows. By constraining one set of players—namely party committees—campaign finance laws force candidates to rely more heavily on other sources of funds. These funds may come from individuals, interest groups, and a variety of “party-like” organizations that emerge to replace the formal parties. These nonparty actors may all be partisans in the broader coalition, but their priorities differ from those of the party organization. And as we will see, by making candidates more reliant on nonparty supporters than on party committees, the rules have broad effects on the electoral system and governing. We will demonstrate that one of these effects is to push candidates away from the center and toward the ideological poles.

In our view, the architecture of campaign finance laws in most American states is not party-friendly. The laws have institutionalized a “candidate-centered” system of financing, which encourages candidates to reach out to nonparty sources for funds. At the same time, the role of party organizations has been circumscribed; they are permitted to give only relatively small amounts of money to candidates precisely because reformers fear that party organizations might be used as conduits to funnel large contributions to them. As we have noted, the unintended consequence of imposing lower limits on parties is that candidates seek a greater share of donations directly from highly ideological individual and group donors.

Perhaps more consequentially, under this system “the center cannot hold”: the party coalition unbundles organizationally. That is, partisan factions that compose the party, including party-aligned issue groups (e.g., environmental groups, gun rights advocates, etc.), choose to engage directly and independently in elections rather than work through the umbrella of the formal party organization. In this way, constraints on parties enable partisan interest groups to assume a larger and less constrained role in elections. The dynamic is especially acute in states where control of the legislature hangs in the balance and where partisan organizing is imperative. The outcome is to tilt the playing field toward ideological candidates favored by “policy demanders,” and to put pressure on moderate officeholders to defend highly ideological policy positions or risk loss of financial support.

To be clear, we are not arguing that the candidate-centered campaign finance system caused partisan polarization. There has been much else going on, and scholars continue to unravel the dynamic that spurred the distancing of the parties. In the category of “causes” one might include changes in demography and technology, or any range of institutional transformations, including how candidates are nominated by an increasingly ideological partisan electorate.° We also recognize that the nationalization of policy issues may have allowed ideological debates to seep into the politics of statehouses where such debates were muted before.

Our theoretical argument about partisan polarization builds on an emerging scholarly view of political parties as an extended network of partisan activists who care deeply about some contentious issues (Bawn et al. 2012). ‘These activists have worked through interest groups and party-affiliated organizations to press their cause with candidates and officeholders. They are influential because they volunteer for campaigns, attend conventions, provide expertise, make endorsements, mobilize their constituencies in primary elections, and raise money. Many of them run for office too. The financing of campaigns is but one element in their drive to shape the direction of party politics and policies. But we think it is an important one, given how critical money is in financing modern campaigns.

For this reason, we think campaign finance laws matter greatly.

Political Parties and Democracy

We start with the premise that political parties are key institutions in a democracy because they help mediate between citizens and governing elites. In theory and practice, parties help link government to citizens by recruiting candidates, waging campaigns that inform and mobilize voters, and ultimately organizing the government to implement broadly supported policies. Voters generally comprehend what the major American parties stand for with respect to principles about the role of government, and they have the opportunity during elections to hold party candidates accountable for campaign promises and policy outputs. Because the party wants to control government, it is motivated to tailor policies that will attract votes and win elections. Moreover, parties typically serve as interest aggregators that pull together various factions into a coalition that pursues broader public purposes than any single faction. In this way, parties help to overcome the inherent fragmentation of interests in a diverse country by forging alliances among constituent groups; this gives the parties legitimacy in claiming to govern for the common good.

To be sure, political parties have a controversial history, rife with examples of monumental corruption and “back-room deals” that serve narrow interests rather than the wider public. But, on the whole, the major American political parties have tended to be broad-based entities with mechanisms strong enough to hold political elites accountable. Despite shortcomings, their enduring party “brand” and institutionalized roles across all levels of government have promoted stability, collective action, and responsiveness in the American political system.

Many contemporary observers seem to blame the parties themselves for pushing politics to the extremes. A common (if inaccurate) argument is that parties have insulated themselves through redistricting so they do not have to be responsive to the broader electorate.’ Two noted economists specifically indict the so-called party duopoly on campaign money for the current climate of hyperpartisanship in American politics and the failure of government to tackle problems (Hubbard and Kane 2013). They claim that the FECA reforms of 1974 enriched the parties and cut money off from individual candidates and groups that might have challenged party orthodoxy. For them, the decision in Citizens United v. FEC allowing corporations and unions to spend without limits ended a “four decade period of repression of independent voices” (133).

We believe that such thinking reflects a one-dimensional understanding of political parties. In particular, critics who fear financially well-off political parties fail to understand that “the party” is made up of many factions and is hardly monolithic in its pursuit of political goals. Some factions focus intensely on influencing specific policies while others tend to engage in the game of winning elections. We think parties behave differently based, in part, on which factions control resources within the party. In our view, parties (like any organization) survive and thrive based on the availability of resources, and the factions that provide those resources have more power over the direction of the broader party. Importantly, for our argument, the rules on how people control and use resources affect the leverage of various factions within the party.

Two Conceptions of Political Parties

Our theory of resource dependency is informed by two different conceptions of political parties. One view sees parties primarily as unitary actors, controlled by “insiders” who seek electoral gains that will give them power and its perquisites. The other view sees parties controlled mostly by “outsiders” who work through issue coalitions to advance policy objectives. At this point, it would be helpful for us to explain more clearly what we mean by “parties” and how these two conceptions of parties inform our analysis.

PARTIES CONTROLLED BY INSIDERS

There is a lengthy scholarly tradition that views political parties as controlled largely by leaders inside the party organization (Michels 1949; Ostrogorski and Clarke 1902). These party leaders might emerge in the legislature, as is common in the United States today, or they might be unelected party bureaucrats, as in much of Europe. Historically, 19th-century party committees in the United States, like those in Europe, were controlled by nonelected officials. These were the local party “bosses” of the machine era. With the weakening of local organizations during the Progressive era, party leaders in legislatures have assumed more responsibility for recruiting candidates and supporting them in elections.

‘The primary vehicle for partisan activity remains the party organization, although the contemporary party is less oriented than in earlier years toward providing patronage to campaign workers in exchange for their support. Moreover, the modern party organization is chiefly a technical operation for waging political campaigns rather than a broader source of social activity, as it was in the past.” To be sure, the party continues to hold meetings and conventions to rally activists around party platforms and (in some states) preprimary nominations; but day-to-day activities are carried out by experienced campaign professionals, called “executive directors,” appointed by a party chair. The party chair, in turn, is accountable to an executive party committee that includes elected officials, donors, and activists.

The main objective of insiders is typically to use the party committee to win elections. Only by winning elections and pursuing majorities can insiders hope to gain the power and wherewithal to reward supporters. For this reason, insiders have a deep interest in seeing the party organization survive as a means of securing control of government. Certainly insiders can create nonparty entities to help advance their electoral goals (and they often do), but they generally prefer the vehicle of the formal party organization to deploy electoral resources. The organizational label conveys a sense of public legitimacy among voters and gives its leaders legal status to place candidates on the election ballot. Moreover, the organization can exploit the historical loyalties of donors and activists from all factions who identify strongly with the party.

Insiders often contend with other factions for control of the party organization. It is typical of modern parties to allow for elections in which activists can run for positions on the executive committee. However, when insiders control the party apparatus completely (as they did in the 19th century), the organization is dedicated almost exclusively to serving the goals of insiders, which means winning elections. Elections are the path to securing power and status. And by controlling government, leaders can reward followers with material benefits such as jobs, high-level appointments, contracts, and other forms of favoritism. These rewards, in turn, enable leaders to foster the commitment of followers who sustain the organization with their contributions of labor, money, or knowledge.

We consider the insiders to be the pragmatist faction of the party with a decidedly Hobbesian view of the world in their quest for instrumental power. The pragmatists are materialists and assume that individuals have a basic animal nature, which compels self-interested behavior. For this reason, the insider creates mutually beneficial arrangements to satisfy those willing to join the party coalition against rivals who might take benefits away. ‘The rampant bargaining and horse-trading that inevitably ensue may appear unprincipled, but the byproduct tends to satisfy large constituencies that help the party to win elections. This dynamic is captured nicely in the words of famed 19th-century Tammany Hall boss, George Washington Plunkitt: