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13 Election L.J. 1 (2014)

handle is hein.journals/enlwjr13 and id is 1 raw text is: The Party Line Paul Gronke and Michael Halberstam T HIS ISSUE OF ELECTION LAW JOURNAL (ELJ) reflects a new turn in the Law of Democracy field. The nexus between campaign finance and lob- bying was the subject of the conference Under the Influence? Interest Groups, Lobbying, and Cam- paign Finance, at the State University of New York's (SUNY's) Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy in March of 2013. This conference, orga- nized by Michael Halberstam and Daniel Tokaji, was the first to focus on this topic. This issue con- tains conference contributions by legal academics, political scientists, public interest advocates, and lobbyists who participated in the conference. In the early 1990s, Lani Guinier challenged the voting rights community's commitment to majority-minority districts on the grounds that fair elections did not guarantee fair representation. Fair elections, according to Professor Guinier, also depended on the decision rules of the legislative bod- ies to which minorities were elected. More than two decades later, this insight continues to inform the debate over the relative merits of majority-minority districts and so-called influence districts. The Law of Democracy field-as it was circum- scribed by Samuel Issacharoff, Pamela Karlan, and Richard Pildes in their scholarly compendium on political process regulation-took in the expansion of the franchise, minority vote discrimination and voting rights, redistricting, ballot access, the rela- tionship between the state and political parties, and campaign finance regulation. Issacharoff, et al.'s The Law of Democracy (1998) and Dan Low- enstein's earlier Election Law Casebook (1995) (now Hasen, Lowenstein, and Tokaji), were founda- tional texts in establishing the field of election law, in part because they probed the structural conse- quences of institutional choices, and their implica- tions for different theories of representation-just as Guinier did. But only recently has the election law community begun to devote greater attention to the written and unwritten rules of legislative decision making that govern lobbying. Just as Guinier argued that major- ity voting on a (say, four-member) county council could vitiate a substantial increase in minority vot- ing strength that yielded No Two Seats (1994), unwritten rules of legislative lobbying that greatly advantage moneyed interests-as a large majority of Americans believe they do-may undermine electoral fairness, especially when money also influences who gets elected. A 2008 article by Richard Briffault, entitled Lobbying and Cam- paign Finance: Separate and Together, that probed the nexus between lobbying and campaign finance regulation served as a common point of departure for the conference. Interdisciplinary debate on lobbying practices and election spending has been a critical part of the dis- cussion and helped to inform the conference. In the political science literature, the answer to the question Can money buy results in Washington, DC? is usually not, or at least not on significant policy issues. The interplay of the legal and political science perspectives animated the conference and makes the Journal a particularly apt outlet for the proceedings. Hall and Deardorff's assessment that congressio- nal lobbying is primarily a legislative subsidy (2006)-which informs three articles in this issue (Allard; Gerken and Tausanovitch; and Halberstam and Lazar)-is consistent with Baumgartner et al.'s findings, also presented here. Analyzing quantitative and qualitative results, Hall and Deardorff argue that professional lobbying sup- plies a matching grant of costly policy information, 1 ELECTION LAW JOURNAL Volume 13, Number 1, 2014 © Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. DOI: 10.1089/elj.2014.1311 Editorial

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