Research defines the “policy” problem and suggests the direction of its resolution.  So by building the policy into the research design, you can give an objective cast to the definition of the “problem”—or doubt can be cast on its very existence.  In fields where disagreement is active, control over the “research” entails control over policy: the shape of the question helps to shape the answer.  Recent days illustrates these familiar truths of policy debate—in both campaign finance and election reform.

   1. Campaign Finance.  McCain-Feingold has passed through an anniversary evaluation, and Tom Mann, writing for the defense on the Campaign Legal Center blog,  asks parties to the argument (including the undersigned) to recognize the

… very difficult problems associated with money and politics.  There are no easy solutions to those problems – whatever the claims of reformers or deregulators.  Our choices inevitably are influenced by our values and beliefs and the empirical world we see around us.

But, of course, “values and beliefs” also play no small part in our construction of this “empirical world”—the world that we like to claim that we “see”, clearly. Mann separates the two in his elegantly stated proposition, and so we cannot be surprised that, in contesting criticisms of McCain Feingold, he rests his defense on the “research”. 

   The research he cites, produced by the Campaign Finance Institute, is meant to have the heft, the authority, lacking in a statement of pure policy preference.  He cites this “data” to refute John Samples’ conclusion that McCain-Feingold has restricted political speech and has provided incentives for money to move from parties to 527s.  On these important issues, he expected research, supposedly pursued separately from “values and beliefs”, to settle the question.

   The legislative success of McCain Feingold, and no small part of its administrative success, owes much to the control of what is the accepted line of “research”.  Mann knows the material, having produced much of it; and he is an exponent of it in court proceedings, mostly relevant in the McConnell case, where this has been hugely influential with jurists seeking secure grounding for their values and beliefs. 

   John Samples, for his part, has shown, masterfully, that the picture presented by this research is both incomplete and misleading. But Mann’s research world is the one inhabited by the media, most familiar to legislators, and so far most decisive in judicial tests of campaign finance controls.

   On the day that Tom Mann presented these findings, the Campaign Finance Institute offered yet more, on “Soft Money in the 2006 Election and the Outlook for 2008.”  It is a “paper” published by an organization that has done good work—but work that it characterizes as “objective research and education”.  CFI’s purpose in this most recent work is to present “research” meant to stimulate a policy debate on 527s and other “groups” operating outside the regulatory system. 

   CFI has found that 527s, now somewhat constrained by regulation, will continue to find outlets for political spending; and that other organizations also looking for political influence, such as both 501(c) and taxable nonprofit organizations, seem to have begun large-scale movements toward the “money in politics” border.  527s have not been “curbed…in general”; more “political spending” can be expected from “alternative outlets”.  (3, 7),  Even where the groups seeking this influence in the last election cycle “did not generally or directly focus on candidates’ or parties’ strengths and weaknesses” , there was “an apparent electoral cast to some of their campaigns.” (11).

   For these reasons, the research seeming to compel it, “a policy conversation” is needed.  “CFI’s recent research demonstrates that changes affecting politically-engaged nonprofits pose genuinely new challenges for campaign finance policy.”  (16).  Research—just plain digging—supports the need for policy-making, which is the factual, neutral justification for considering and then generating fresh regulation of activity with an “apparent electoral cast”. We are not to be alarmed, since this will begin with a conversation, to which we are all invited.

   2. Election Reform: Voter Fraud.   The New York Times this morning reports another way that the research game is played. Once commissioned, research into voter fraud took a direction unattractive to its sponsor, the Election Assistance Commission, which revised the conclusion of its experts.  A conclusion that there was “widespread” agreement on the rarity of fraud was reworked into the far more tepid judgment that  there was little agreement one way or the other.

   One Commissioner defended the change as nothing more than care taken with the quality of the research: “As a federal agency, our responsibility is to ensure that the research we produce is fully verified. Some of the points made in the draft report made by the consultants went beyond what we felt comfortable with.”  Research “fully verified” is often just research that those who produce, use or sponsor it can be “comfortable with”. 

   Research is like that: it can produce discomfort, which is why it can be so beholden, in the field of policy, to the “values and beliefs” that Tom Mann calls on us to keep in mind.

Bob Bauer