You Want a Voice? Pony Up.

But don't hold your breath.

Most people would agree that donating to political campaigns buys you access that other constituents lack, and this week two graduate students studying political science — Joshua Kalla at Yale and David Broockman at UC Berkeley — released a study that shows it to be true.

[...]

They took a real bill — the authors don’t say what the legislation was – and they randomly sent one of two form letters asking for a meeting to discuss the legislation to 191 House members who had not yet taken a position on it.

One email featured the subject line, “Meeting with local campaign donors about cosponsoring bill,” and said that the group would consist of “active donors.” The other just said that a group of “local constituents” wanted to discuss the bill. The emails specified that if the lawmaker was unable to personally attend the meeting, the group would like to meet with the most senior staffer available.

  Joshua Holland at Bill Moyers

And, can you guess what happened?

And the results were exactly what one might expect: 2.4 percent of the letters from constituents won a meeting with a legislator or his or her chief of staff, compared with 12.5 percent of the letters from “active donors.” In other words, those with potential donations were five times as likely to get a meeting with someone at the top. And just under 19 percent of the donors were able to meet with the next-highest staffer, compared with under six percent of ordinary constituents.

Actually, what I expected was that nearly all of the donor letters would have gotten a favorable reply. While the donors got much greater access, 12.5 percent is NOT a good showing. If you can’t even get a meeting with your congressperson by buying it, what does that say for citizens’ participation in governance?

It’s worth noting that all those who met with congressional offices were real CREDO members or political donors, none of whom knew they were part of an experiment.

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Also, nearly one in five of the donor groups got access to a senior staffer, while just 5.5 percent of the constituent groups did. That means the donors had more than three times the access to top staffers than the constituents.

  WaPo

I consider a meeting with a senior staffer to be, in practice, about the same as a meeting with the actual congressperson. So that raises the buying percentage to around 32.5 percent. Still low. And the access of constituents is only raised to about 8 percent. Disgustingly low.

Reminds me of the anti-Iraq-invasion march I attended where our state rep wouldn’t even allow any of us into his office. He sent, not a senior staffer, but some lacky with a pen and piece of paper down to us that we could put our names to.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.