Office of Campaign and Political Finance has long followed a practice in which small “incidental” campaign finance expenses do not trigger a need to file as a political committee. Some union giving has fallen under this guidance and the practice is thus under attack from corporations, the wealthy, and the right wing dark money group Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance. OCPF holds a hearing today. Below is the text of comments I filed with OCPF.
December 6, 2018
Director Michael Sullivan
Office of Campaign and Political Finance
John W. McCormack Building
One Ashburton Place, Room 411
Boston, MA 02018
Dear Director Sullivan:
I write in reference to OCPF’s “Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking: Defining a Political Committee.” As a political scientist at the University of Massachusetts at Boston[1] who studies both Massachusetts politics and money in politics I have taken note of press accounts which present the arguments of business and other interests who wish to limit union political participation. For example, a recent article in the Boston Globe referenced OCPF-IB-88-01 concerning the “incidental” expenditures of unions as presenting an “unusual political advantage,” “an unfair advantage,” “an inherent unfairness,” and offered a call to “even the playing field.”[2] A substantial body of political science research teaches us that there is indeed a wide inequity in power wielded in campaign finance and politics generally – but that vast and dominating advantage lies not with unions, but with wealthy individuals and corporations.
In 1975 the political scientist E.E. Schattschneider offered a memorable rebuke to the notion that political dominance of one group would quickly be met with an equal counterforce: “The flaw in the pluralist heaven is that the heavenly chorus sings with a strong upper crust accent.”[3] More recent research has quantified the extent to which corporations and wealthy individuals dominate our politics.
For example in 2014 political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page published a path breaking article titled “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens” in the peer-reviewed journal Perspectives in Politics. Multivariate analyses of a unique data set of key variables for over 1,700 policy issues showed that “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.”[4] Gilens and Page’s research finds that “both individual economic elites and organized interest groups (including corporations, largely owned and controlled by wealthy elites) play a substantial part in affecting public policy, but the general public has little or no independent influence.” Gilens and Page show that while a few groups “particularly labor unions” do a reasonably good job of representing the policy preferences of average Americans, the positions favored by economic elites and corporations are negatively related to the issue positions favored by average citizens. The prevailing interest in American politics is not unions or the general public, but wealthy individuals and the corporations they control.
In his book Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America,[5] Gilens shows that with few exceptions individuals in the bottom ninety percent of the citizenry lack any influence over the policies their government adopts. Yet the policy preferences of the “affluent” in the top ten percent are met; not always, but frequently. Professor Gilens collected national survey questions over extensive periods and determined the policy preferences in the lowest tenth percentile, the fiftieth percentile, and the ninetieth percentile (the affluent, although not the super-rich). He examined their views across the dimensions of foreign policy/national security, social welfare, economic policy, and moral or religious issues; and tracked whether or not the policy preferences of each group were passed into law. Some interest groups – like the American Association of Retired Persons and labor unions – do a fair job of representing the policy preferences of average Americans and those groups do have some influence, but nowhere near that of the wealthy. Notably, the research for Affluence and Influence covers the roughly fifty years prior to the Citizens United decision, which by all analysis has further exacerbated the power advantage of wealthy individuals and corporations. Professor Gilens’s research leads him to question the extent to which we may fairly characterize America as a democracy.
Jeffrey A. Winters writing in his book Oligarchy[6] expresses that corporations should be seen as reflections of the wealthy individuals they serve, muting the distinction between the corporate form and individuals of wealth. A good example of this principle is the legal challenge turned aside by the Supreme Judicial Court in A1 Auto Parts, Inc. v. Director of the Office Campaign and Political Finance, SJC-12413 (2018).
Research also shows that wealthy individuals ignore the concerns of average citizens when those concerns might implicate the pocketbooks of the rich. In an innovative study of millionaires in the Chicago area, Benjamin A. Page, Larry Bartels, and Jason Seawright showed that wealthy individuals have far more conservative policy preferences than average citizens across a range of issues. For example, wealthy individuals, like average citizens, express an interest in improving the nation’s education system. But, “Our data suggest that the great enthusiasm of wealthy Americans for improving the US educational system mostly focuses on improving effectiveness through relatively low budget, market-oriented reforms, not on spending the very large sums of money that might be necessary to provide high quality public schools, college scholarships, or worker retraining for all Americans.”[7] Across a range of issues, the wealthy place a high priority on preserving their own wealth and incomes over the policy preferences and needs of average citizens.
As Gilens and Page in their journal article and Gilens in his book suggest, unions do a good job of representing the policy preferences of average citizens, even when those citizens are not union members themselves. In Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer – and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class, political scientists Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson lament a political system in which powerful corporate interests have come to control American politics, in part by their successful efforts to weaken unions which are “the only major . . . interest focused on the broad economic concerns of those with modest incomes.”[8] “Unions were on the front lines of every major economic battle of the mid-century” – and the decline of unions, argue the authors, has been a vast blow to the economic realities of ordinary Americans. The decimation of unions – which their opponents seek to advance in this rule making – also reduces democratic participation, as labor has been a force (now fading) in motivating and mobilizing voters.[9] In other words, corporate and wealthy interests would like to reduce democratic participation they see as an affront to their economic interests.
Gordon Lafer traces the efforts of corporations to defund unions on a state-by-state basis in The One Percent Solution: How Corporations Are Remaking America One State at a Time. Like Hacker and Pierson, Lafer acknowledges the role of unions in mobilizing less engaged citizens to demand their rights in ways that may entail taxing corporations. It is not just the wages and benefits that unions win for their own members but the residual effect on the labor force in a region that animates business opposition. Attacking unions (especially public sector unions), finds Professor Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, enables business to “weaken their most powerful adversary, clearing the way for legislatures and governors to achieve right-wing priorities such as tax cuts, sharp reductions in social spending, and the elimination of regulations.”[10]
I understand that interests concerned with weakening unions have seized upon a chart published by OCPF showing that spending by PACs in 2018 was concentrated in the labor sector. However, in assessing whether any interest has an “unfair advantage” and in considering ways to “even the playing field,” OCPF should view political spending through a much wider lens. For example, the National Institute on Money in Politics maintains a database of political contributions in all fifty states. It’s Election Overview for Massachusetts in 2018 unsurprisingly shows business as the dominant spending interest in the commonwealth.[11] Total contributions for “elections, candidates, and committees” (including federal offices) in Massachusetts totaled over $127 million.[12] The Institute aggregates contributors by Broad Sector and General Industry. There are three categorizations with the Broad Sector of Labor – the General Industries of General Trade Unions, Public Sector Unions, and Transportation Workers. The entire Labor Broad Sector contributed $3.05 million of the $127 million tracked thus far by the Institute. A review of the entire list – including such General Industries as Lawyers and Lobbyists, Real Estate, Insurance, Securities & Investment, Pharmaceutical & Health Products, and on and on, shows exactly what one would expect: the playing field tilts wildly toward business and corporations. Journalist Rachel Adele Dec made a related point in a Commonwealth report recently. Looking at $1.4 million in 2018 union contributions from OCPF data, she found that the median contribution was a paltry two hundred and fifty dollars.[13] The notion that unions are somehow privileged and business disfavored is a pernicious and perverse falsity.
To the extent that the current rulemaking is a reflection of the idea that unions own some grand advantage over corporations and wealthy individuals, the exact opposite is true. Corporations and the wealthy are the undisputed champions of influencing American politics. Labor is the only effective counter balance to complete political domination by the wealthy in America and should not be further disadvantaged by this rulemaking.
Respectfully submitted,
Maurice T. Cunningham
[1] For identification purposes only.
[2] Jon Chesto, “Unions Political Advantage Could Be Tested in Mass.,” Boston Globe, November 21, 2018, https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2018/11/20/unions-political-advantage-could-tested-mass/BwEpbqFpPWLSL6Xtr2GxMO/story.html
[3] E.E. Schattschneider, The Semi-Sovereign People: A Realist’s View of Democracy in America (Fort Worth: TX: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich College, 1975), 35.
[4] Martin Gilens and Benjamin A. Page, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” Perspectives in Politics 12 (September 2014),
[5] Martin Gilens, Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014).
[6] Jeffrey A. Winters, Oligarchy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
[7] Benjamin A. Page, Larry Bartels, and Jason Seawright, “Democracy and the Policy Preferences of Wealthy Americans,” Perspectives on Politics 1, no. 1 (March 2013), 51-73, 60. On the overriding concern with wealth and income protection, see also Winters, Oligarchy.
[8] Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer – and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010), 57. See also Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, American Amnesia: ow the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016).
[9] Hacker and Pierson, Winner-Take-All Politics, 139-142.
[10] Gordon Lafer, The One Percent Solution: How Corporations Are Remaking America One State at a Time (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017). Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, “New Conservative Strategies to Weaken America’s Public Sector Unions,” Scholars Strategy Network (October 2015).
[11] National Institute on Money in Politics, “Election Overview/Massachusetts/2018,” https://www.followthemoney.org/tools/election-overview?s=MA&y=2018.
[12] As of November 30, 2018, the database had recorded just over 73% of available records, so these numbers will rise.
[13] Rachel Adele Dec, “Union Loophole Isn’t a Very Big One: Donations This Year Totaled About $1.4 Million,” CommonWealth, November 3, 2018 https://commonwealthmagazine.org/opinion/union-loophole-isnt-a-very-big-one/