Public financing of California’s electoral campaigns could curb power of money in politics

This year’s gubernatorial primary illustrated vividly that California needs better ways to fund political campaigns.

Proposition 4, The California Fair Elections Act, is a crucial step in the right direction, allowing Californians the freedom to create systems of public financing of elections. 

In the 38 years since it was banned in California, the corrupting influence of money in politics has become increasingly problematic, severely narrowing our options. This came into sharp focus in the recent primary, where Democratic voters faced a choice between Tom Steyer and Xavier Becerra.

Like many progressive Californians who voted for Steyer, I did so with great ambivalence. I agreed with many of his policies, but like many others I strongly mistrust billionaires. I suspect for many who voted for Becerra, their wariness of billionaires outweighed their resonance with Steyer’s policies. 

All of us were in a bind due to the choice before us.

Ironically, Steyer’s personal wealth was one of the things that liberated him from the shackles of external funding. The fact that Steyer received as many votes as he did, despite voters’ mistrust of the ultra-rich, is evidence of the powerful appeal of his progressive messages, including a strong stance on protecting the climate and support for California’s proposed wealth tax, Proposition 40. In contrast, Becerra’s centrist policies were in line with the contributions he received from the fossil fuel industry and other large companies.

If you look beneath the soundbite debates, you see a persistent, systemic problem: Our current political system makes it very difficult to get elected without the backing of either personal wealth or wealthy corporate or individual donors.

How many strong progressive candidates for California governor — who lacked access to either of these sources of funding — were shut out due to this systemic, baked-in bind? How much of our entire political system in California is driven by access to wealth?

The outsized influence of those with excessive wealth not only removes input from the hands of “we the people,” but it puts it in the hands of those whose ethics are often severely compromised. 

Prop. 4 repeals the 1988 ban on the public funding of elections in California, providing the opportunity to create local and state programs on a case-by-case basis. It does not mandate public funding or create a system. It simply allows the state and local governments to decide if they wish to do so, and sets general guidelines. Our decisionmakers, with public support, would determine spending limits, eligibility criteria and the form of the matching funds system.

In recent years, we have witnessed growing evidence of the inherent corruption of excessive wealth. As a psychology professor, I have been fascinated by the research of Dr. Paul Piff of UC Irvine, who has demonstrated that upper-class individuals are more prone to entitlement and narcissism and less inclined toward empathy, compassion and generosity than people from middle- and lower-classes.

They are also more likely to display notable ethical lapses, such as taking goods intended for others, cheating to win a prize, breaking traffic rules or endorsing unethical workplace behavior. These tendencies show up under a broad range of conditions, from long-term upper-class status to temporary artificial “wealth” in a psychology experiment’s rigged game of Monopoly. 

From the shockingly broad network of inhumane behavior revealed by the Epstein files to this substantial body of psychological research, there is no denying that exorbitant wealth undercuts basic human empathy and imperils people’s ethical bearings.

The resulting self-serving behavior by people whose wealth imparts outsized power has the potential to unravel the fabric of community and threaten democracy. A now-classic paper by Northwestern University political scientist Benjamin Page and Martin Gilens, then of Princeton, illustrated this, demonstrating that economic elites and business interests have a substantial influence on public policy, while average citizens have little impact at all. 

This is not inevitable. Good, successful approaches to democratizing elections already exist. For example, Zohran Mamdani would not have won New York City’s mayoral race without access to the city’s matching funds program, which aims to minimize the power of private wealth through the public financing of candidates who agree to strict limits on individual donations. New York’s state government has a similar program for statewide races, as do 13 other states. 

Let’s learn from our recent experience of the Steyer-Becerra conundrum — and Mamdani’s once-improbable victory — and open the door for a similar system in California, where wealth does not determine who represents us and what policies become law.