The two books reviewed jointly here make important contributions to scholarship on the role of money in politics. Refreshingly, both scholars ask serious questions and employ hard data to answer them, moving past the glut of journalistically led “conventional wisdom” that pronounces all money spent toward American campaigns “bad.” Instead, they understand why campaigns cost money and explore the broader implications for democracy of the procurement of resources under our existing regulations and norms.

Jennifer Steen's book is a model of good social science, as well as an answer to an important question in the field: What difference does it make that wealthy candidates spend their own money in congressional races? It is a brave question because the answer seems to be an obvious “nothing good.” Indeed, conventional wisdom (especially journalistic wisdom) holds that the candidate with the most money always wins and that by extension, candidates with a lot of money win by a lot. Steen takes this proposition head-on in a careful analysis that investigates whether self-financed candidates scare away worthy competition; whether they win more often than candidates who depend on contributions; whether they “help” parties by relieving them of the burden of fund-raising support; and whether, in fact, they are more politically independent than those who may feel they owe something to their financial supporters. The author does not have a particular axe to grind. Instead, she searches for informed answers to important questions.

Steen finds that self-financed candidates do indeed have an effect on the number of competitors in primary nomination contests, all other factors held equal. She does this through a painstaking, and perhaps overly technical, analysis developed in chapter 3. Many methodological appendices are cited here, and this is perhaps the only chapter where undergraduates might run into trouble. Still, Steen reassures us that she has looked at the question from every conceivable angle, and that is a good thing. While self-financed candidates reduce competition overall, they also present competition that otherwise would be unavailable, say, against entrenched incumbents. But fewer candidates will pursue an open seat with a “millionaire” in the race, though perhaps the reading of this book will change that, as Steen also shows that millionaires get poor electoral return on their personal investment. That is, the source of the money matters in congressional elections. Candidates who spend their own money get less electoral benefit from it than those who spend money contributed by others.

The way in which Steen teases out this discussion is wonderful reading and very persuasive, as she gets into the mechanisms of campaigning by discussing what precisely goes into contacting others for fund-raising. Veterans of campaigns will recognize that fund-raising is in itself an important form of campaigning, garnering not only cash but votes, labor, and linkages to other supporters. While the author never says so explicitly, she is clearly challenging the idea that fund-raising is inherently distasteful and that all candidates loathe it. Fund-raising works best when it is linked to appeals on issues, ascriptive characteristics, or group affiliations. This leads into a broader discussion of the quality of representation delivered by the self-financed when they do win—it depends less on listening to those represented and more on selling the officeholder to the governed. The mechanisms are troubling indeed. On the question of party resources, Steen also finds that Democrats tend to conserve theirs when wealthy candidates are involved, whereas Republicans invest in races when wealthy candidates do as well. This may suggest more about the types of districts where Republicans are truly competitive (see James E. Campbell's Cheap Seats: the Democratic Party's Advantage in U.S. House Elections, 1996) than about a particular party's philosophy.

My issues with the book regard what is perhaps not dealt with but implied, namely, the idea that rich candidates distort democracy by dissuading “average” people from running for office. Well, I do not think many average people do in fact run for office or ever think about it. Perhaps not all candidates are personally wealthy. But in terms of education and professional experience, most candidates are far from average. While Steen compares the wealth of self-financed candidates with the wealth of all other candidates, what probably matters more is the potential to achieve wealth, or access to wealthy people, which sets candidates apart from average citizens. Therefore, comparing the educational and professional backgrounds of candidates, instead of just wealth, would be more helpful. As argued by Peter Francia and his colleagues (The Financiers of Congressional Elections: Investors, Ideologues, and Intimates, 2003) and Jennifer L. Lawless and Richard L. Fox (It Takes a Candidate: Why Women Don't Run for Office, 2005), it is both the exposure to the concerns of wealthy donors and the perceptions of potential candidates' qualifications that distort the idea that a common person will represent common people. In the case of considering a run for office in the first place, being encouraged by others who have run for office or are likely to help you run for office is critical and, by nature, not widely accessible.

I recommend that every scholar interested in the role of money in elections should read Steen's book. It would also be excellent for practitioners, all scholars of Congress and elections, graduate and advanced undergraduate students, and every journalist.

Ray LaRaja has written an important book about political parties and campaign finance reform. It treats political parties, and not the money or the candidate, as the central actors in the system of elections. Small Change is balanced, thoughtful, and a delight to read, and it too should be required reading for all serious scholars, students, and practitioners of electoral politics. It is suitable for anyone new to the topic, including both advanced undergraduates and graduate students. I will certainly use it in my courses.

LaRaja puts his study in a historical framework to ask what motivates campaign finance reform in the first place. Conventional wisdom holds that corruption is both the catalyst and the target of reform efforts. LaRaja shows that, instead, partisan interest in “leveling the playing field” regarding the other party's perceived electoral advantage is the true reason for reform. This is a fresh way of telling the story of campaign finance reform and LaRaja does it in a way that is not simply descriptive but interpretive. His narrative demonstrates that several important themes run through the regulation regime. First, we have not lost the Progressive sense that party bosses are bad and, therefore, parties must be opened up to the input of the people. Second, Republicans have always had a more centralized fund-raising and campaigning structure due to their ideological homogeneity, whereas the Democrats have always had a more localized structure due to their comparative heterogeneity. Third, Republicans generally favor more capital intensive campaign methods and try to limit those that are labor intensive (e.g., involving union members or federal employees doing campaigning on the ground) while Democrats favor the exact opposite. Those who think they understand the development of reform will look at it differently as a result of this book.

The empirical meat of the book comes when LaRaja looks at the expenditure of soft money by parties in the era between the Federal Election Campaign Act and Amendments (1971 and 1974) and the current regime. He tackles the question of why Democrats supported the passage of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA) of 2002, which appeared to work directly against their electoral self-interests, while most Republicans opposed it. Using his reading of the partisan justifications behind previous reforms, LaRaja shows that a left-leaning ideological faction in the Democratic Party sought to contest the decision of party elites to tilt in favor of corporations for the sake of winning elections. He considers the implications of the BCRA at length, finding that while both parties (but especially Democrats) compensated for the loss of soft money with a surge in hard money, the lost soft money that was spent on “party-building” activities was not offset with the new hard money.

Here is where LaRaja has the most interesting data and most controversial conclusions. Sifting through political party spending records, he catalogs party spending in three categories: 1) candidate targeted activity, 2) mobilization and grassroots efforts, and 3) administrative expenses. He finds that the final category, administrative, was the largest area of soft money spending, not candidate targeted activity. He points to this as evidence that parties are more than merely “pass-through” entities, a charge that has been consistently applied to political parties by their critics. However, the evidence in the book is not sufficiently detailed to support his assertion. That is, if items like “staff' are counted as administrative expenses, how do we know that such staff is used in party-building activities and not in candidate targeted activity? The same can be said for equipment, databases, travel, and other daily expenses—if they do not stay with the local or state party organizations, then what was the value for party building? Here and later in the book, La Raja convincingly shows a correlation between soft party spending and state party activity. While he implies that soft money investment pays off in state party strength, there is no way to discern in which direction the causal arrow points. These concerns are just another way of saying that the author encourages future scholars to test his propositions, especially as we watch the presidential campaign finance system unravel.

LaRaja ends the book with a series of thoughtful, though unattainable, suggestions for reform, putting him in the company of works like David Adamany and George Agree's Political Money: A Strategy for Campaign Financing in America (1975) that try to recommend policy alterations (though Adamany and Agree would certainly not propose what LaRaja does). LaRaja recommends giving political parties more latitude in the raising and spending of money through three specific reforms: allowing soft money donations to national committees up to $100,000, significantly raising caps on party-coordinated spending on behalf of candidates, and letting political parties control the release of public funds in the presidential general election (pp. 228–231). If he succeeds in getting lawmakers to pay attention to the idea that parties are underresourced, he will have done us all a very big favor indeed, as I agree with him that enabling parties to be unifying, programmatic forces (rather than promoters of candidate primacy) will improve the quality of campaigning and the coherence of public policy.

Both Steen's and LaRaja's books are important correctives to a subfield that is too often viewed with simple-minded suspicion. Most believe money in politics is bad, money in politics leads to corruption, and politics always favors those with the most money to spend. Happily, both books cause us to revisit these notions with solid data and nuanced analyses.