Self-financing is a symptom, not a cure
On our minds: Vladimir Putin, Michael Bloomberg, elite networks of authoritarian rule, the Democratic presidential primary, just your usual Thursday things. |
Self-Financing Doesn’t Fix Democracy’s Money Problem |
 | | Mr. Bloomberg attacked Mr. Sander’s socialist policies.Erin Schaff/The New York Times |
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What gives national leaders their power? Look past the regalia and ceremony, and you’ll see that it’s all an illusion. On his or her own, a president or prime minister is just a person in an office. |
So leaders rule on a myth: that their power is innate. Before the modern era, that power was typically said to come from God. Now, it is said to come from the nation, a distinctly modern concept that describes both the national territory and the community of citizens within it. |
It works a little like fiat currency. Slips of colored paper have material value only because we all pretend that they do. Leaders have the authority to rule only because we collectively treat them as something much grander than just a person in an office. |
But sometimes you can glimpse the truth that hides behind the myth, as we did on a reporting trip to Russia in early 2015. |
To much of the world, Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, embodies the image of innate authority more than perhaps any leader. He appears to rule unchallenged over the world’s largest territory, commanding all of Russia’s military might, fearsome security services and vast economic interests as if they were extensions of himself. |
But, to political scientists, and to those in the know in Moscow, Mr. Putin is a case study in the artificiality of any ruler’s power. |
It’s not just that the cheesy photos of Mr. Putin riding horseback or lifting weights are an elaborate performance. His actual power, like that of any ruler, comes from the constituencies and institutions that collectively hold him up. Without them, he’s just another person in an office, even if that office also has a bench press. |
But Mr. Putin’s secret, and perhaps his greatest weakness, is that his circle of constituencies is much smaller, and much more fractious, than the mythology would have you believe. |
In reality, his rule is propped up by a set of political elites that include his country’s security services, its military leaders, a handful of ultrarich businesspeople known as oligarchs and some others. |
It’s not that Mr. Putin is their pawn. Think of him more like the central node in a network of a few hundred people, maybe a few thousand, who collectively run the country. He rules over that network, but also at its pleasure. |
This is how most authoritarian systems work, and it’s not terribly stable. Coups are a high risk; all it takes is a plurality of that network deciding that they’d be better off with someone else. And when that network of elites breaks down, it can lead to chaos. |
Shortly before our visit to Russia, its ruling network split. It seemed to be over a feud between the security services and the powerful ruler of Chechnya, a semiautonomous region. Oil prices were also plummeting, putting the oligarchs’ wealth at risk. Mr. Putin disappeared from public view. Rumors of a coup were everywhere. While it later appeared that he might’ve simply had the flu, even that hinted at the precarity of his rule. Were Mr. Putin truly as powerful as his image projected, there would’ve been no need for the Kremlin to keep his illness a secret. But any show of weakness at a time of turmoil among Mr. Putin’s ruling elite — even a brief illness — is practically an invitation for those elites to fall out of line. |
“You know, I had a very interesting conversation with Putin two years ago,” Vladimir Ryzhkov, a former opposition lawmaker, told us on our trip. |
“He said, very sincerely, that ‘You know, Vladimir’ — he has known me for many years — ‘you know, Vladimir, I am afraid that if I turn back a little bit, Russia could be destabilized extremely,’” Mr. Ryzkhov said. “He really believes that only through this hard line is it possible to keep control of this huge country. That’s his mind.” |
So much of authoritarianism comes down to this. Because rulers draw their power from a closed network of elites, they are much weaker than they appear, so they compensate by signaling, or exercising, their power. And their incentives are skewed: pleasing those elites, or at least keeping them in line, comes before the national or popular interest. |
Democracies, in theory, avoid all this by putting a leader at the mercy of the electorate, aligning his or her incentives with whatever is in the best interest of voters. At the same time, his or her rule is meant to be checked by transparent rules and institutions, not by the whims of self-serving elites. |
But democracies, especially those with free market economies, have a money problem. Businesses and individuals spend so heavily on campaign contributions and advertising campaigns that any leader needs their support. That leader is left balancing between two constituencies — their voters and their donors — whose interests might not always align. |
President Trump ran, in part, on a promise that his personal wealth would allow him to sidestep democracy’s money problem. With less need for donors, he would be free to put voters first. |
And, now, Michael Bloomberg, the ultrawealthy former mayor of New York, is gaining ground in the Democratic presidential primary on a similar, if so far largely implicit, proposition. |
“When everyone thinks there’s too much money in politics, then it seems like a noble thing to have a candidate who refuses to take money,” she wrote. But self-financing doesn’t actually remove the role of money, she argued. It merely shifts the leader’s loyalty from his or her public donors toward his or her private business interests. |
Here’s Ms. Victor’s case: |
| Campaign donations aren’t just a way to line politicians’ pockets. They’re a signal of support. A candidate who takes none is harder to understand. Bloomberg is much more of a black box than any other candidate because he has no donors. This also means we know less about his loyalties, and the people/organizations/ideas to whom he’s tied. You don’t get to be one of the wealthiest people in the country without forging some relationships along the way. But because none of those partners are showing their support through funding, we know less about who they are for Bloomberg than we do about any other candidate. Self-financing isn’t noble. It’s secretive. It doesn’t mean he’s free of ties to others, it just means we have less information about his ties, relative to other candidates. |
One of Mr. Putin’s most popular moves, and something for which even skeptical Russians still credit him years later, was to take on Russia’s oligarchs. For much of the 1990s, they had been selling off the country’s assets, using their money to fuel corruption and criminality with impunity. |
Mr. Putin brought the oligarchs under control, at times brutally. But he did not change the underlying system. He merely replaced self-serving oligarchs with more loyal ones. As we found on our 2015 reporting trip, the Russian presidency is still built atop a small network of elites, and that network still includes plenty of space for oligarchs. Not so much for regular citizens. |
Running a self-financed campaign does not sidestep or solve the role of money in American democracy. It merely changes where the money comes from, and in ways that make the president’s constituencies — his or her own network of support that makes him or her more than just a person in an office — even less transparent. |
- In case you feel dumb for making mistakes in Excel, maybe this will put things in perspective. A 2016 study estimated that one-fifth of all genetics research papers contain erroneous data from Excel automatically converting lists of gene names into dates. For example, in one data set compiled in 2006, Excel converted each instance of SEPT2, which is the name of a gene, to “2006/09/02.” The error rate was higher in more influential papers, probably because those papers include more data. Whoopsy doodles!
- Costantino Pischedda, a University of Miami political scientist, finds that protest and resistance movements are likelier to succeed when the opposition and the ruling powers share the same ethnic identity. When they don’t share a common ethnic identity, their political dispute can much more easily take on an us-versus-them dynamic that makes it easier for the state to dig in and harder to bring change.
- In a long and engaging article for The Guardian, Samanth Subramanian traces the rise and the growing bottom-up influence of India’s Hindu supremacist movement, which is reshaping Indian democracy.
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