The Court of Public Opinion

'The Court of Public Opinion' 

I’ve become more and more convinced (and more and more hopeful that I’m wrong) that we can get people to do anything if we throw enough fear or money at them.  Campaign finance reform, though it doesn't sound particularly exciting, is a crucial application of this dynamic.

There is certainly a correlation (although the direction of causation may be in question) between the amount of money spent on a presidential campaign and the likelihood of a candidate winning.  NPR found that:

In presidential primaries, money is usually the sign of a winner. Since 1980, the best-financed candidate has won eight out of the 10 contested primaries.

My intuition says that more money means more media presence, hence more people convinced to vote for that candidate.  Or, it may be that winners are a sign of money.  Steven Levitt, the author of Freakonomics, has a fascinating rebuttal of NPR's line of thinking.   I’m not sure that it can be extrapolated to the office of the presidency, though; the race to the POTUS seems to have many more dynamics at play.  How else could we explain that a corrupt dimwit from almost-Russia was a viable threat in the polls to a president of the Harvard Law Review?

Despite the direction of causality, the role money plays in a democracy is an important and potentially problematic one.