We Are Not Interested: How Dominant Political Parties Use Campaign Finance Law to Lock Interest Groups and Third Parties Out of the System – Note by Rowley Rice

The scholarship on “politics as markets” reveals that dominant political parties use “lockups” to control the political system. So stronger, process-oriented judicial review is necessary to disrupt existing lockups. This Note comparatively applies this scholarship to campaign finance laws in the United States and United Kingdom. It shows that these countries’ campaign finance regimes function as lockups that permit the major parties to dominate their countries’ politics. Lockups allow these parties to control elections and the national discourse. These campaign finance lockups raise significant normative concerns because they restrict alternative voices’ political participation. This challenges democracies’ need for varied, pluralist free speech. In both nations, judicial review has disrupted the system and weakened these lockups, but this disruption has been more extensive in the United States. Finally, this disruption may bring its own costs by giving wealthy elites further, disproportionate speechmaking power.