Campaign Finance Reform "Feature Creep"

Paul Sherman at the Center for Competitive Politics discusses the similarlities and differences between technology and campaign fince reform.

According to a recent article in the New Yorker, feature creep is caused by a confluence of three actors. There are the techies, who design the products, but are only a small part of the market. There are the marketers, who "see each additional feature as a new selling point." And then there are the unfortunate consumers who, while acting as shoppers, "tend to think that the more features there are, the better. It's only once we get the product home and try to use it that we realize the virtues of simplicity."

So why are we writing about it? Because much the same phenomenon drives the increasing complexity of campaign finance regulation. Campaign finance has the same "book-length manuals" as the latest gadget; the GPO's "Federal Election Campaign Laws" and "Title 11, Code of Federal Regulations" run over 700 pages combined. And the thousands of pages of judicial and agency opinions construing those book-length manuals certainly suggest that its features are "mysterious."

The problem Sherman sees is that for campaign finance reformers there are never enough features even though the general public has neither an understanding of nor a use for the new campaign finance features. That of course assumes they care, which in the grand scheme of "corruption" coming from Capitol Hill, campaign finance doesn't even make the top ten.

There are, naturally, significant differences between technological and "reform" feature creep. Technology consumers, for example, don't get together and vote on the one model of cell phone that everyone else has to use. Thankfully, while aggregated market choices may push cell phones in a more complex (and less usable) direction, consumers are still free to select among cell phones on the basis of usability. Not so with campaign finance regulation. Once the votes in Congress or the FEC have been tallied, we're left with a one-size-fits-all solution, deviation from which is criminalized.

Functioning but unworkable electronics are also easy to get rid of, a fact that consumers take advantage of:

"Product returns in the U.S. cost a hundred billion dollars a year, and a recent study by Elke den Ouden, of Philips Electronics, found that at least half of returned products have nothing wrong with them. Consumers just couldn't figure out how to use them."

Legislative buyer's remorse is a more difficult problem. Once a regulation has been approved, it's unlikely to be repealed and we're stuck with it. This is partly because the unity between shopper and user is absent in campaign finance regulation; the people to whom "reform" is sold are, for the most part, not the people who will have to comply with the regulations. That cost is borne instead by those who have to comply with the new regulations, namely, politicians and political activists. And the cost bears most heavily on the politically unsophisticated among these groups, the novice politician and the grassroots activist.

So what can be done? There's no easy solution, but the one we'd endorse is "to make simplicity into a selling point . . . as Apple has done with the iPod." We'd be happy to replace those 700-page manuals with just ten short words: "Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech."

Granted, such a no-frills system may leave the techies yearning for more, and it might put the advertising wizards at Democracy 21 and the New York Times out of business. But on user-friendliness, the First Amendment, unadorned, can't be beat.

While I am not a big fan of campaign finance rules, there are some real disclosure benefits that come from the law. However, the reformers have taken the disclsosure and limits features too far. While the First Amendment has a certain simple appeal, the reality of our political world is that we will never return to a Pre-Tilman act era nor do I think we necessarily should.