On March 27, 2002, President George W. Bush signed H.R. 2356, the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA) of 2002, into law. Some commentators were skeptical of the bill’s reach, but others celebrated its signing as a huge victory. I read headlines like “US Is Poised for Major Reform on Election Funding,” “Campaign Reform Persevered,” “Campaign Bill Changes the Rules,” “Soft Money Era Ended by Senate,” “An Extraordinary Victory, Soft-Money Shutoff: At Long Last, Congress Closes a Loophole,” “A Giant Step for Americans,” and “Wall St. Loses Political Clout: Campaign Finance Reform Deals Blow to Soft Money, PACs More Significant.” I was in my faculty office. My colleague next door studied business and public policy. I knocked on her door and told her about BCRA’s passage, adding, “You’ll be happy to know this is the end of corporate influence in the United States.”

It is through this lens that I read David Primo and Jeff Milyo’s excellent book. The authors explain their project’s genesis as coming out of a conference organized by Nate Persily at Stanford University, in conjunction with Bob Bauer and Ben Ginsberg, formidable legal and political experts from the Democratic and Republican Parties, respectively. The sense of the conference was that fundamental changes in the campaign finance landscape, particularly the ruling in Citizens United in 2010, were profoundly transforming the power dynamics in American elections.

At the conference, Primo and Milyo brought up their interest in conducting a public opinion survey to find out what Americans thought about campaign finance in America. I thought that most Americans did not know anything about campaign finance—and did not think about it much, until I received the elite version of the survey (see chapter 7, “What Do the Experts Think?”). I filled it out and that was that.

Until the publication of this book, that is. Campaign Finance and American Democracy is an important book that will stimulate research and discussions (perhaps academic “fights”) for some time to come. And it is long overdue. Primo and Milyo approach their work with skepticism that campaign finance excess leads to a corrupt system of government. In short, they are looking for proof. What evidence do we have that a major overhaul in campaign finance reform would change citizens’ perceptions of their democracy? As they discover, that evidence is in extremely short supply—and, of course, this leads to some even more worrying questions. Specifically, have we missed the real reason(s) for Americans’ suspicion of government?

The corruption canard is at the heart of the campaign finance reform movement. We get regulation of campaign finance when it rears its head in events such as Watergate and Enron, as though corruption scandals in government only emerged in the 1970s. The Buckley v. Valeo decision in 1976 acknowledged concern about corruption or the appearance of corruption, forming the basis of important Supreme Court decisions on the topic to this very day. However, Primo and Milyo believe, “Those who say they are concerned about corruption are actually concerned about two other things: inequality, and the nature of democratic politics” (p. 14).

Using CCES data, Primo and Milyo demonstrate that the American public has only a vague idea about what kind of financial activity is limited in campaign finance law. Worse, they understand very little about disclosure requirements, including and especially the idea that their own contributions are fully disclosed. Their privacy concerns expose a fundamental contradiction in the disclosure rationale. If knowing which “moneyed interests” back candidates is an essential piece of information for voters, why should we be concerned that we know which candidates our neighbor supports and how much they donate?

A concern shared early in the book is that the rhetoric around campaign money primes citizens to react negatively to politics simply because money is mentioned. Their experiment shows that referring to lobbying as “the ability of interest groups to communicate their views to public officials” has nearly three times the approval as “lobbying by interest groups” (p. 62). The fickleness of Americans runs deeper than that. When the authors ask about whose speech should be regulated, corporations and interest groups receive the harshest responses. But if the corporation is Ben & Jerry’s, rather than ExxonMobil, Americans find the former more benign than the latter. In addition, Primo and Milyo find that our conceptions of corruption in politics are so broad that we believe it exists whenever our “side” loses. This is problematic indeed, and the authors’ appropriately note that many reformists have offered a false promise: take out the money and all will be well. Even in a perfectly controlled public financing environment, someone’s interests are going to lose out to some other interest. That’s pretty much representative democracy for you!

Primo and Milyo acknowledge that other scholars have indeed offered some of the critiques they do here, but their framing and analysis of recent opinion data make a unique contribution on its own. What really sets this book apart, however, is its presentation of the analysis of experts in the field. We political scientists do not come out of this so well. Just like the American public, it turns out that what you believe depends on where you sit ideologically. The experts are more in tune with certain empirical facts—such as that, as campaign spending increases, so does voter turnout—but are wildly out of tune when it comes to the role campaign finance plays in the trust (or lack thereof) we have in the political system. Left-leaning elites think money is a crucial driver of mistrust, whereas right-leaning elites think it is peripheral at best. Although elites are routinely surveyed for their views, Primo and Milyo point out that seldom are elites asked about their personal ideology. This bit of information is revelatory.

I would recommend this book even if you are not interested in campaign finance, though it is unlikely you would have read to this point if that was the case. It does an excellent job of thoroughly explaining the formation of the research questions and their methodology. Each chapter has its own appendix so that advanced undergraduates and graduate students can see precisely how the analysis was done. This is especially helpful when reading the careful analysis of state campaign finance reforms and public opinion stagnation.

Primo and Milyo do not offer an alternative solution, but they do suggest that educating journalists would help relieve some of the “money as evil” mantra and that this mantra itself is a distraction. If I have any critique of this book, it is that they do not push us quite far enough. For example, if about 84% of Americans are employed by the private sector, why are we surprised that the private sector’s position in politics endures? How are candidates recruited and socialized? Is money what prevents the “average” person from running? I suspect there is more to it. After you and your students read this book, I hope you will think more deeply about how bias is sustained in American democracy.