AEI Press Releases New Campaign Finance Reform Book by Wallison & Gora

AEI Press has announced the release of Better Parties, Better Government: A Realistic Program for Campaign Finance Reform, by Peter Wallison and CCP Academic Advisor Joel Gora.  The authors demonstrate how deregulation of the campaign finance system – in particular removal of restraints on political parties, can alleviate many of the ills that traditional command and control reform have failed to solve, and have indeed exacerbated.

From AEI’s release:

Every federal campaign finance reform law enacted since 1971–ostensibly intended to keep politicians honest and limit the influence of contributors–has in reality protected incumbents by reducing the funds available to challengers. …

The most effective way to change this pro-incumbent system is to lift the restrictions on political parties, allowing them to become both the principal vehicles for political fundraising and the principal sources of campaign funds for their candidates.

In Better Parties, Better Government: A Realistic Program for Campaign Finance Reform, Peter J. Wallison and Joel M. Gora guide us through the complex tangle of laws, rules, regulations, exceptions, exemptions, and safe harbors that constitute our current campaign finance regime, and explain how to reform the system with a single change: ending the restrictions on spending by political parties in support of their candidates. This single reform will make elections more competitive, improve the candidate and policy choices available to voters, and thereby transform American politics.

Professor Gora has been a member of CCP’s Academic Advisory Board since our inception. He is a professor at Brooklyn Law School and former legal counsel to the American Civil Liberties Union. As an ACLU lawyer, he represented the plaintiffs in the Buckley v. Valeo case. Mr. Wallison is the Arthur F. Burns Fellow in Financial Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute and served as White House counsel to President Ronald Reagan.