Cash seldom buys political power. What counts are ideas and the ability to inspire

Silly signs win elections

THE popular view of politics is that it is all about money. This is an exaggeration. Consider the example of America, a country where government is often caricatured as “for sale”. Rich candidates can buy a lot of airtime, which occasionally wins them office: think of Michael Bloomberg in New York. But often they flop: think of Mitt Romney, Steve Forbes, Ross Perot and Meg Whitman. Or John McCain, who alienated voters struggling with their mortgages when he could not recall how many houses he owned.

The American presidential election of 2008 cost more than $1 billion. That sounds a lot, but America has 300m people and dozens of television markets. Spending a shade over $3 per American to tell them about their presidential choices hardly seems excessive.

Barack Obama started with nothing, against an opponent, Hillary Clinton, who started with both money and connections. He ended up raising more cash because he inspired people. He ran a brilliantly decentralised campaign. Supporters set up 70,000 personal fund-raising pages, organised 200,000 campaign events and posted endless Obamaphile videos on YouTube. Chris Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook, helped Mr Obama with the techie stuff. The Obama campaign showed how fast a web-savvy movement can spread.

The momentum did not last, however. With the economy still in a ditch, another popular movement eclipsed Mr Obama’s. On February 19th 2009 a reporter called Rick Santelli lost his temper on live television. Reacting to the news of yet another bail-out for homeowners, he exploded: “The government is promoting bad behaviour!…This is America! How many people want to pay for your neighbour’s mortgages that have an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills?” Mr Santelli called for a Tea Party: an anti-tax protest like the one in Boston that heralded the American revolution. The notion caught on. Tea parties erupted everywhere, attracting millions.

The Tea Party movement has a cranky fringe, but its core belief—that the government should tax and spend less—is attractive to many mainstream Americans. The tea partiers’ passion helped Republicans to capture the House of Representatives last November.

Beautiful chaos

Technology has made it cheaper and easier for ordinary people to organise themselves. So the most influential political entrepreneurs are often those who can spot the next big thing and help it along. For example, an organisation called FreedomWorks, founded by Dick Armey, a veteran Republican and former House majority leader, offers tea partiers, many of whom are new to activism, practical tips on such things as setting up phone banks. Mr Armey makes no claim to lead the Tea Party movement. Adapting Hayek, he calls it “beautiful chaos…like the market”.

The future of political activism lies in decentralisation, reckons Adam Brandon, a spokesman for FreedomWorks. His ideological opponents would agree. Ricken Patel, a Canadian activist, has built up a progressive campaigning group called Avaaz from nothing to 7m members in only four years, and on a trivial budget, by exploiting the power of the web.

Avaaz’s dynamism is born of internal democracy: it adopts the issues its members tell it to adopt, from the humane (close Guantánamo) to the Luddite (ban genetically modified crops). Because it operates in 193 countries, it can turn local issues into global ones. It can muster a huge number of online signatures in a short time: its recent petition in defence of WikiLeaks collected 300,000 in 24 hours. It can make any politician’s telephone ring off the hook.

The tea parties and Avaaz show that you do not need to spend a lot of money to be influential. Yet many groups and individuals try to translate cash into sway. Websites such as opensecrets.org publish a torrent of data showing how much American companies, industries and interest groups spend on lobbying and electioneering. The trend is relentlessly upward.

The amount spent on lobbying America’s federal government has risen from $1.4 billion in 1998 to $3.5 billion in 2009. Spending on electioneering has shot up, too. In 2000 the total for all federal elections was $3.1 billion; in 2008 it was $5.3 billion. Elections in other countries are much cheaper. After adjusting for the difference in population, Britain’s parliamentary poll last year cost only 7% of the American total, thanks to tight spending limits.

It is easier to count dollars than to measure their effect, however. Do rich donors decide elections? It is not clear that they do. For one thing, different donors often pursue different goals. George Soros, a progressive billionaire, backs progressive causes. The Koch brothers, two libertarian tycoons from Kansas, back libertarian ones. Corporations, too, are hardly monolithic. American oil firms tend to back Republicans. American lawyers (who give far more to campaigns) tend to back Democrats. Several industries, such as real estate and health care, back both sides.

In democracies with a free press, the main danger of money in politics is not that the rich will buy an election, but that they will lobby the victor for favours. A tax break here, a subsidy there and soon you are talking about real money. In America, lobbying by hospitals and drug firms soared as Congress debated Mr Obama’s health reforms, which is perhaps why the bill that passed in 2010 was so porky. Worse, lobbying by coal firms has helped to stymie American action against global warming. But it was not the biggest obstacle to reform: voters hate high energy bills.

Politics in many countries is marred by nepotism. Even when elections are free, a candidate from a famous political family has a huge head start, in that voters already know his name. Americans have elected two presidents called George Bush. India has had three prime ministers from the Nehru-Gandhi clan, and may have more.

Yet the advantages of dynasty are diminishing. The internet helps talented newcomers to become famous fast. And voters often demand more than just pedigree, as Caroline Kennedy recently discovered when she tried to amble into a Senate seat. One American senator in ten is closely related to another national politician, a ratio that has been falling steadily for two centuries. In the early days of the republic, it was closer to one in two.

The power of ideas

The strongest force shaping politics is not blood or money but ideas. The big movements of the past century—communism, fascism, democracy, liberalism—have all been propelled by big ideas, good and bad. So the people who influence government the most are often those who generate compelling ideas or supply them to the right politicians at the right time.

Edwin Feulner, for example, is one of the most influential conservatives in America. His face may be less familiar than Sarah Palin’s, but his fingerprints can be found on the fine detail of legislation since 1977, when he took charge of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank. Heritage is big—it has a staff of 240 and more than 700,000 fee-paying members. And it is influential because it combines analytical rigour with shrewd marketing.

You need to define your target audience, says Mr Feulner. For him, that means Congress. Heritage’s head office is a short walk from Capitol Hill, on the Senate side. Last year, to make it that little bit easier for members of the House of Representatives to pop in, Mr Feulner opened a second office on the House side. When a bill is being mooted, Heritage supplies ideas. During drafting, Heritage scholars suggest revisions. And when a vote is near, Heritage gives every lawmaker an easily digestible two-page document explaining what the bill contains and what its effects might be. Timing is crucial. “If you put an idea out too early, no one reads it. A day too late, you miss the vote,” says Mr Feulner.

American think-tanks are more influential than those in other countries. They helped concoct the Marshall Plan and the Iraq war. They are often well funded. The Brookings Institution, a non-partisan outfit, has an annual budget of $80m. That is 25 times bigger than that of Demos, a rough British equivalent.

More importantly, American think-tanks are closely entwined with government. The president of Brookings, Strobe Talbott, was deputy secretary of state under Bill Clinton. John Podesta, the founder of the Centre for American Progress, a progressive think-tank, was President Clinton’s chief of staff. Dozens of scholars from both institutions joined the Obama administration. A similar revolving door operates between conservative think-tanks and Republican administrations. The interchange creates lines of communication among wonks, lawmakers and the White House. Journalists talk to think-tankers because they know their ideas are taken seriously by those in power.

Debate among think-tankers is usually civil. Facts matter. Conservative and liberal wonks sometimes join forces to promote causes about which they agree. Heritage and Brookings, for example, have a joint venture called the “Fiscal Wake-Up Tour” to educate the public about America’s unsustainable deficits.

Some accuse American think-tanks of an incestuous relationship with politicians, or of forming part of a permanent ruling class. There is some truth in this: think-tankers often stay inside the Beltway (the ring road around Washington, DC) all their working lives. But they are not impervious to elections. Liberal thinkers struggle to influence conservative administrations, and vice versa. And some think-tanks now operate on a global level, where parties matter less and ideas matter even more.