"Recent years have witnessed the rise of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) as vehicles for non-investment finance, including in nonprofit and political fundraising. As with other financial sectors in which NFTs have a role, the use of NFTs in financing nonprofits and political campaigns and committees has revealed gaps and ambiguities in existing legal regulatory systems. Appetite exists to evolve legal frameworks to complete and clarify applicable bodies of law and regulation.

Over the past hundred years, American law has gradually – —and controversially –— expanded the speech rights of corporations. O O ver the same period, corporate speech has become pervasive, and now dominates most major channels of communication. C C orporate speech ranges from anodyne commercial appeals to expressions of ethical values to campaign finance payments. W W hen a corporation “speaks,” who should we understand is the real speaker? T T his chapter explores issues of speech attribution for corporations, and argues that the best approach is for attribution to turn on the corporate governance that produces the speech.

This chapter discusses corruption in the United States. In recent decades, as a narrow view of corruption has taken hold, the United States has experienced a significant increase in economic inequality and a decrease in social mobility. Despite the growing public discourse on economic inequality, concerns about the viability of a democratic system in the face of extreme economic inequalities have a long history. In recent years, corruption has been frequently invoked to describe the state of American politics, with business corporations and their ultra-wealthy owners indicated as possible culprits. In the United States, the notion of corporations having a corrupting effect dates back to the early days of the Republic, when it was feared that corporate charters could be granted by state legislatures as rewards for favors or bribes. This chapter’s main conclusion is that while illegal forms of corruption may be uncommon in the United States, its legal variants are widespread, and is further discussed in Chapter 9.

This chapter examines the role of disclosure as a tool for promoting corporate political accountability by reviewing how shareholders reacted to various events in the United States and abroad that either changed the ability of firms to engage in the political process or revealed previously hidden corporate political activity. The conclusions drawn from this summary are mixed, with investors’ reactions contingent on myriad factors, including the form of the political activity engaged in, prior contestation over such activity by shareholders, and other firm-level nonmarket and market dynamics. The chapter concludes by discussing the limits of disclosure as a tool for regulating corporate political activity, as well as public policy more broadly, and advocates for broader, institutional reforms regarding the role of money in politics.

This chapter uses a novel database on contractual arrangements between politicians, political brokers, and businessmen in Benin to investigate the way the nature of these arrangements depends on the level of political competition. We find that firms provide financial support to local and national politicians in exchange for policy concessions, direct budget support of firms, ‘favourable’ procurement auctions (bid-rigging), and various forms of state capture. In addition, while bid-rigging features constantly in politician–firm contracts, increased electoral uncertainty is associated with less demand for policy concessions and stronger preference for direct forms of state capture, that is, the appointment of firms’ agents or cronies to key government positions. In other words, electoral uncertainty could simultaneously contribute to democratic consolidation through political turnover, and to worse forms of corruption through state capture by business elites.

Separation of powers or, more exactly, the rule of law, due process or, in Europe, the right to a fair trial influence the institutional setting of antitrust or regulatory authorities and law enforcement. An increased role given to specific regulation or antitrust in order to tackle some fundamental issues posed by the concentration of economic-political power does not go without independent and impartial decision-making from an institutional and procedural, a personal or a financial and lobbying perspective.

Since Buckley v. Valeo, campaign finance jurisprudence has been riven by the constitutional limits on the regulation of funded campaign speech. The Court’s enduring but unpopular compromise that contributions can be limited to prevent corruption but that the right to free speech prevents the restriction of expenditures has been assailed as both too restrictive and insufficiently robust. The debate is typically cast as a straightforward question of which source of power is the greater threat: plutocratic wealth that can corrupt leaders, or a state that can oppress its citizens. However, this intractable conflict can be unified by considering democratic governance as a matter of constituent self-rule. Neither private nor state influence over campaign media overdetermines the results of elections; both operate to influence voters. The critical question is what poses the greater threat to voter cognition and preference development. This observation, framed by a Kantian understanding of free will, captures the true core of the judicial debates – contestation over what circumstances pose the greatest threat to the autonomy of voter preference formation.

Most democracies are representative. Elected by the people, representatives constitute a legislature and create laws. This is typically done through voting. This raises an interesting question of institutional design: should our representatives vote transparently or by secret ballot? No contemporary philosopher, to my knowledge, has addressed this question. In this chapter I argue that if we take seriously the value of political equality—a normative ideal that nearly all democratic theorists embrace—then voting among representatives in a legislature ought to occur by secret ballot. Representatives should vote just as citizens do in elections. Democratic equality, I argue, thrives in darkness.

Incentives within the political system during the 1985–2018 period made exceedingly difficult a shift toward either a more effective developmentalism or a more liberal market economy. Among the political institutions that drove this equilibrium were: 1) an electoral system that fragmented political party representation; 2) coalitional presidentialism, whereby a strong president sought to overcome fragmentation by providing incentives to coalition partners. Many of the 3) president’s tools of coalition formation were derived from the developmental state apparatus, including appointments and fiscally opaque instruments. The fragmentation of party life, alongside the many veto players engendered by coalitional presidential system, enabled 4) the emergence of both pluralist and corporatist forms of interest representation. The complementarities between these four political institutions had concrete effects: a resolute political system, in which change was slow and incremental, marked by long-term reciprocal relations between private firms and public actors, defensive parochialism, weak checks and balances, and weak controls on the developmental state apparatus.

Developmental states must be politically strong to design, implement, and recalibrate developmental strategies. They must have the capacity to provide rents to firms that nudge them up the innovation frontier, as well as to demand reciprocity, or returns on those rents. Achieving these goals requires effective instruments of control. Analyzing four developmental programs undertaken by various governments during the 1985 to 2018 period – the Manaus free trade zone, the automotive regime, the ethanol program and the Greater Brazil Plan – this chapter demonstrates the endemic weakness of controls. The Brazilian developmental state was ineffective at controlling rents in ways that channeled business energies in strategically productive long-term directions. The causes of weak control included political factors associated with the coalitional presidential system and the weakness of checks and balances, bureaucratic factors such as the fragmentation of oversight, economic factors such as incumbent firm influence, and judicial factors such as the toothless policing of illicit links between firms, the developmental state apparatus, and the political realm.

By virtually every measure, American politics are more polarized today along political party lines than they have been in decades. In Congress, Republicans and Democrats are more sharply differentiated and internally homogeneous than they have been since the late-nineteenth century. This polarization has occurred in both houses of Congress and mirrors similar trends at the state level and among executive officers throughout American politics. The presidential nomination process is no exception. We live in a time of “hyperpolarization.”

Campaign finance may be partly to blame for modern hyperpolarization. Although today’s levels of partisan polarization began building long ago, the deregulation of campaign finance under the Roberts Court has likely accelerated the ongoing process of polarization even further. Deregulation of campaign finance permitted wealthy donors to channel more money into presidential elections and gave them greater influence over the political process.

This chapter reviews the data that scholars have started to assemble on the volume, content, targeting, and effect of paid online advertising in the United States. It discusses how online advertising is regulated through formal rules and shaped informally by content negotiations between advertisers and platforms. It also explains how the decentralized methods of purchasing digital ads make systematic research challenging. That said, this review (at best) provides tentative conclusions, which will be tested in earnest over the next few years. In many ways, then, we are at a precipice awaiting the flood of more systematic analyses yet to come as scholars dig into the newly available data. With that in mind, it reviews what is known at present and evaluates the information that is available through the platform archives.