Monthly Archives: September 2015

What’s Goin’ On?

Politics,

The University of Pittsburgh’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs (GSPIA) held its inaugural National Security Symposium on Thursday without its best-known participant, Dr. Norman Finkelstein, a controversial expert on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, who was scheduled to speak about media coverage of Israel’s 2014 invasion of Gaza. This is either an outrageous act of academic censorship or a colossal screw-up by the GSPIA faculty.

Dr. Finkelstein is no stranger to controversy. He is the son of Holocaust survivors and has publicly criticized the Israeli government for its treatment of Palestinians in the occupied territories. He was denied tenure at DePaul University in 2007 despite an impressive publication record, an action that was criticized as an affront to academic freedom by public intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky. This interview from seven months ago will give you an idea of Dr. Finkelstein’s views.

The symposium was planned by an organizing committee of graduate students. Their advisor was a visiting professor, Dr. Luke Peterson of Cambridge University.  Dr. Finkelstein agreed to speak at the symposium on April 20 and signed a contract on August 26. However, to be official, the contract had to be signed by a Pitt representative, and that never happened.

According to the official story, the student committee realized last week that there was not enough money to pay for the symposium, and it was decided to cancel Dr. Finkelstein’s appearance. But when Dr. Peterson called him last Wednesday, September 16, to let him know his invitation had been withdrawn, he told Dr. Finkelstein that the Pitt administration refused to sign the contract, and “raised a number of issues regarding your presence–all of which I’m sure you’re familiar with, many of which or all of which are either bogus or trumped.” Not surprisingly, Dr. Finkelstein criticized Pitt on his website for a blatant act of political censorship, saying that the administration had “the moral integrity of a slot machine.”

Dr. Peterson now says “my bad;” he claims that he misunderstood the reason for the cancellation, and that the real reason was a shortage of money. Which of Dr. Peterson’s statements was truthful? Did he fall on his sword for the benefit of the Pitt administration?

It’s not clear from publicly-available information what the budget for the symposium was. Their website lists four “supporters”—the Pitt Global Studies Center, the Pitt Nationality Rooms, the GSPIA’s Ridgeway Center for International Security Studies, and Katz Business School’s International Business Center. Ordinarily, “supporters” are groups that have contributed money for the event, although that isn’t explicitly stated. The organizing committee also made a crowdsourcing appeal for $5000. Their final update states that they only reached 51% of their goal. Dr. Finkelstein’s speaking fee was $4000.  Since there were two other speakers plus venue, catering, and other expenses, it’s unlikely that $5000 was the total budget for the event.

If the official story is true, why did representatives of a major university book speakers for a highly-touted symposium without having secured the money to pay them? Did the committee only realize that their crowdsourcing attempt would fall short just a week before the event? Why was Dr. Finkelstein the speaker who was cancelled? (In case you’re wondering, he says they did not ask him if he would accept a smaller honorarium.) I can accept the idea that a group of inexperienced graduate students would be naively optimistic about their likelihood of raising money, but were there no permanent GSPIA faculty members looking over their shoulders to protect the university’s reputation?

Anyone who reads Pittsburgh newspapers knows that local conservatives react angrily to any criticism of Israel. Is it possible that the committee’s financial problems were real, but were caused not only by the crowdfunding shortfall but also by the withdrawal, or threatened withdrawal, or one or more of their primary sponsors?

We should never accept conspiracy theories when incompetence is a plausible alternative explanation. However, having spent almost 40 years as a university professor, this official story does not ring true to me.

The real losers are the Pitt students who lost the opportunity to hear Dr. Finkelstein’s important point of view.

The Muslim Clock Strikes

Politics, Social psychology,

Ahmed Mohamed, a 14-year-old high school student and self-described science nerd from Irving, TX, took a homemade clock to school. He showed it to his science teacher, who approved. But when it accidentally beeped in his English class and he showed it to that teacher, she reported that he had a bomb, the police were called, he was removed from school and arrested. Fingerprints and a mug shot were taken, and he was not permitted to contact his parents for several hours. Although he told everyone who questioned him that it was only a clock, he was suspended for three days for bringing a fake bomb to school. Irving police spokesman James McLellan explained, “We attempted to question the juvenile about what it was and he would simply only tell us that it was a clock.” Apparently, that was not the right answer.

Ahmed the terrorist
Ahmed the terrorist

Irving police chief Larry Boyd justified their overreaction by saying, “You just can’t take things like that to school.” A blogger compiled a list of seven other (presumably White) kids who brought homemade clocks to school and were not arrested. The incident raisies obvious questions about racial profiling in school disciplinary cases. (Ahmed’s family is from Somalia, so he is Black as well as Muslim.) We know from dozens of social psychological studies that ambiguous actions are interpreted differently depending on whether they come from a member of a liked or a disliked group. I’ve chosen some examples that involve possible violence or the potential for violence, since that was the issue in Ahmed’s case.

In one of Allport and Postman’s 1947 studies of rumor transmission, the initial participants were shown a drawing two men standing in a subway—a White man holding a razor and an African-American man holding nothing at all. The first person was asked to describe it to a second person who had not seen the picture, who described it to a third person, and so on. By the end of the chain of six or seven participants, the razor had jumped to the Black man’s hand almost half the time.

In an experiment by Birt Duncan, White participants were shown a videotape of an argument between a White man and a Black man. At the end of the argument, one man stomps out of the room, and in so doing, may or may not have shoved the other man aside. (The camera angle makes this deliberately ambiguous.) There are four versions of this video, consisting of all four possible combinations of a Black and a White perpetrator (the man who may have done the shoving) and victim (the man who may have been shoved). Viewers of the video were asked whether an act of violence had occurred. The incident was more likely to be labeled violent when the perpetrator was Black and when the victim was White. With a Black perpetrator and a White victim, 73% of the audience saw the incident as violent. With a White perpetrator and a Black victim, 13% saw it as violent.

I’ve written before about studies by Joshua Correll and others of the “police officer’s dilemma,” a simulation in which participants were shown slides of Black and White men standing in public places holding either a gun or an innocuous object, such as a cell phone or a soda can. The participants had half a second to press one of two keys, labeled “shoot” or “don’t shoot.” Results showed that Black men were more likely to be “shot” than White men, both when they were armed and when they were not.

Glenn Greenwald writes that Ahmed’s ordeal and other examples of Islamophobia are an almost inevitable result of 14 years of fear-mongering and official harassment of Muslims, encouraged for political gain by U. S. politicians who have been waging wars against Islamic countries for three decades.

At a town meeting in New Hampshire, the following exchange occurred between Republican front-runner Donald Trump and a man in the audience.

  • Man: “We have a problem in this country, it’s called Muslims. We know our current president is one. You know, he’s not even an American. Birth certificate, man.”
  • Trump: “Right. We need this question? This first question?”
  • Man: “But anyway, we have training camps growing where they want to kill us.”
  • Trump: “Uh-huh.”
  • Man: “That’s my question: When can we get rid of them?”
  • Trump: “We’re going to be looking at a lot of different things. You know, a lot of people are saying that, and a lot of people are saying that bad things are happening out there. We’re going to look at that, and plenty of other things.”

Presumably, some of those “other things” involve people who speak with a Spanish accent. Will Trump pay a political price for his failure to correct the statement that President Obama is a Muslim, and his implicit promise to deport Muslims? So far, the media have been reporting Trump’s xenophobia in a matter-of-fact way, without calling attention to historical parallels or the negative consequences of encouraging fear and hatred. Of course, the corporate media are owned by wealthy people who continue to profit from the long-term migration of bigots into the Republican party.

Update (9/19/15):

In their coverage of this Q and A, the corporate media have emphasized Trump’s failure to challenge the statement that President Obama is a Muslim. The rest of the exchange has either gone unmentioned, or the media have accepted a Trump spokesperson’s assertion that his answer referred to “training camps” rather than to Muslims generally. You can judge for yourself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTNHZfWMihw

However, since these training camps are part of a right wing conspiracy theory and have never been shown to exist, I don’t see how it’s to Trump’s credit that he is looking into how to get rid of them.

Porn Wars

Media, Social psychology,

Feminists have been telling us for decades that consumption of pornography trains men to treat women as sex objects and teaches them that it’s acceptable for women to be subjugated to their male partners. Some critics have claimed that it encourages rape and violence toward women, although there is no convincing evidence that nonviolent pornography causes physical aggression toward women. Studies of pornography’s effects on attitudes toward women’s equality have reported conflicting results.

Blogs are supposed to have colorful images, right?
Blogs are supposed to have colorful images, right? (Credit: Dreamstime)

A new study by Taylor Kohut and colleagues at Western University in London, Ontario seems to be more definitive than previous studies. The data come from the General Social Survey (GSS), a large-scale interview survey of American public opinion conducted by the National Science Foundation. Participants were 10,946 men and 14,101 women interviewed between 1975 and 2010. Pornography consumption was measured by a question asking participants whether they had seen an X-rated film in the past year. (Twenty-three percent said they had.) Attitudes toward women were measured using five questions or sets of questions.

  • Feminist identification. “Do you think of yourself as a feminist or not?”
  • Women holding positions of power. Three questions measuring attitude toward women holding political power, i.e., “If your party nominated a woman for president, would you vote for her if she were qualified for the job?”
  • Working outside the home. Five questions, i.e., “All in all, family life suffers when the woman has a full-time job.”
  • Abortion. Three questions measuring whether a legal abortion should be available in cases of rape, pregnancy of an unmarried woman, or an unwanted child for any reason.
  • Traditional family. Ten items measuring support for a family in which “women take the main responsibility for care of the home and children, while men take the main responsibility for supporting the family financially.”

There are good reasons to believe that this is a strong study. It has a large sample that is representative of the American adult population. In addition, these questions are embedded in a much longer survey, making it unlikely that participants were sensitized to the purpose of the analysis.

The data were analyzed by separately comparing men and women who had or had not watched pornography. Pornography consumption had no effect on self-identification as a feminist, or on attitudes toward the traditional family. However, contrary to predictions from feminist theory, both men and women who had viewed pornography in the past year had more positive attitudes toward women holding positions of power, were more supportive of women working outside the home, and had less negative attitudes toward abortion. While these differences were not large, they were statistically significant due to the large sample size.

The data fail to support the hypothesis that pornography encourages subordination of women. However, the authors carefully avoid claiming that the results show that pornography encourages liberal or feminist attitudes toward women’s equality. This is a correlational study, and correlation does not imply causation. A positive correlation between pornography consumption and liberal sexual attitudes could mean that watching pornography causes feminist attitudes (implausible), or that people with liberal sexual attitudes are more likely to watch pornography (much more likely), or a that some third variable, such as a non-religious upbringing, causes both.

A recent experiment done in Denmark by Gert Martin Hald and colleagues appears to contradict the Kohut study. The Danish study had two parts—a survey and an experiment. The participants, 200 young adult Danes, were asked about their prior pornography consumption and given scales measuring attitudes toward women and hostile sexism. Among the men (but not the women), the greater the pornography consumption, the less egalitarian their attitudes toward women were and higher they were in hostile sexism.

The second part was an experiment. Participants were randomly assigned to watch either 30 minutes of nonviolent pornography or a control film. Attitudes were measured after the film, and it was found that, for both men and women, pornography watching led to greater hostile sexism. However, this only occurred for those participants who were low in the personality trait of agreeableness, described as a tendency to be suspicious and antagonistic toward others. Highly agreeable (friendly and cooperative) people did not show any effect.

Are these results inconsistent with the Kohut study? Maybe, but maybe they can be reconciled. The American and Danish surveys found opposite results.  But as Kohut points out, the participants in the Hald study differed from theirs in important ways. They were Danes rather than Americans. They were young adults with an average age of 25, while the American sample had an average age of 45. Most importantly, they had agreed to watch a pornographic film. Only about 70% of those contacted agreed to participate. Thus, the Danish sample is younger and presumably more liberal in their sexual attitudes. To put it differently, the more inclusive American sample includes older people who are more likely to have conservative sexual attitudes and probably don’t watch pornography.

What about the results of the Hald experiment? Suppose it’s true, as Kohut found, that in a representative sample of people of all ages, those with more liberal sexual attitudes are more likely to watch pornography. Suppose it’s also true, as Hald found, that pornography’s content undermines those egalitarian attitudes, at least among some audience members, making them more sexist than they would have otherwise been. Nevertheless, they might still be more liberal than those who don’t watch pornography at all.

This is admittedly highly speculative. Disentangling these possibilities will require a longitudinal study in which both pornography consumption and sexual attitudes are measured among a representative sample of adults over a period of several years.

A Theory in Search of Evidence

Media, Politics, ,

On Sunday, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette published an editorial headlined “Murder on the Rise.” It states that the homicide rate is up this year “in more than 30 major American cities”—but not including Pittsburgh. It repeats the “theory” that this change is due to the “Ferguson effect,” which argues that police, facing criticism from African-American activists, have been “less aggressive in patrolling problem neighborhoods.” It concludes that a return to the “bad old days” of high homicide rates is unacceptable and that law enforcement and the Justice Department “must bring their resources to bear to figure this out.”

The statistics they cite come from an August 31 New York Times article whose authors, Monica Davey and Mitch Smith, surveyed an unspecified number of cities and reported that at least 35 of them have seen increases in “murder, violent crimes, or both.” The article is accompanied by a chart showing increases in the homicide rate of between 4% and 76% in ten cities. But not all cities have seen more killing. They mention three cities where murders have not increased.

There are several problems with the Times article. First of all, their statistic has neither a numerator nor a denominator. Since they lump murder together with other violent crimes, the authors don’t specify exactly how many cities reported increases in murders. More importantly, they fail to report how many cities they surveyed—a critical point, since if the actual homicide rate is unchanged, half of cities can be expected to show increases just by chance. Finally, they give no summary statistic indicating whether the overall homicide rate in the cities surveyed is up or down, by what percentage, and whether the change is statistically significant. This is important since homicide rates in many cities fluctuate quite a bit from year to year, and the number of violent crimes was unusually low in 2014.

The authors had to conduct their own survey because there are no up-to-date, authoritative data on homicides in the nation’s cities. The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports, which provide city-level crime data, do not come out until the following year. This lack of hard data allows people to claim that the crime rate is either increasing or decreasing, whichever their ideology leads them to prefer, based on incomplete samples.

Even if the homicide rate has increased significantly, there is nothing to connect it to the protests following the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, one year ago. To their credit, the Times mentions the research of criminologist Richard Rosenfeld, who found that homicides in the St. Louis area peaked before Michael Brown was shot, and who states that there is no evidence of a “Ferguson effect.” Unfortunately, this finding is buried deep in the article and is surrounded by stories about specific murders and theories which lack empirical support.

A man holds his grandson at a rally protesting the death of Walter Scott in Charleston, NC. (Photo: AP/David Goldman)
A man holds his grandson at a rally protesting the death of Walter Scott in Charleston, NC. (Photo: AP/David Goldman)

Three days later, the Washington Post got into the act in an article about the shooting death of Illinois police officer Charles Gliniewicz. Although there is no evidence that race or anti-police sentiment played a role in his death, Jim Pasco, executive director of the national Fraternal Order of Police and several other law enforcement sources hold the Black Lives Matter movement responsible for what they imply is an increase in the killing of police officers. One of them blames the “dangerous national rhetoric that is out there today.” One Black activist who disputes these claims is also quoted.

Buried in the middle of this article is a critical fact. The National Law Enforcment Officers Memorial Fund reports that 24 police officers have been killed by suspects so far this year, “the second lowest number in the past five years.” Yet according to a September 1 Rasmussen poll, 58% of likely voters believe “there is a war on police in America today,” while just 27% disagree.

Ta-Nehisi Coates criticized the Times article as an example of “false equivalence,” since the authors don’t make a clear distinction between opinions and facts. Unless they read the story carefully, readers could easily conclude that “there is as much proof for the idea that protests against police brutality caused crime to rise, as there is against it.” (The author of the Post-Gazette editorial seems to have fallen into this trap.) This same argument applies to the Post article.

Social scientists refer to this journalistic practice as false balancing. It’s found, for example, in articles about climate change which imply that scientists are evenly divided as to whether the climate is changing, and which fail to evaluate the quality of the evidence each side presents. Cautious journalists have been transformed into stenographers, faithfully reporting what everyone says but never examining whether what they say makes sense. Paul Krugman once suggested that if candidates of one party said the Earth is flat and and the other party said it’s a sphere, the newspaper headline would read “Views Differ on Shape of Planet.”

As of this writing, at least 820 people have been killed by the police so far this year. African-Americans, with 13.2% of the population, account for one-third of these deaths. For those deaths in which the victim is unarmed, the Black percentage is even higher. While it is clear that major changes in policing are needed, law enforcement is digging in its heels and fighting back with theories such as the “Ferguson effect.” By failing to make it clear that claims of a “war on police” are without empirical support, the corporate media play into the hands of those who are trying to convince the public to sacrifice the civil liberties of African-Americans in exchange for an illusory increase in public safety.

Update (9/11/15):

police1

The American Enterprise Institute published this chart showing the number of gun-related police deaths per capita from 1870 to the present. As they point out, exaggerating the danger to police has been used as a justification for the increasing militarization of U. S. law enforcement.

You may also be interested in reading:

White People Don’t Riot:  A Manual of Style For Ambitious Young Journalists

A Downside of Police Body Cameras

Social psychology, ,

The shooting death by police of Gilbert Flores, a Latino man who bystanders claim had raised his hands in surrender, has San Antonio authorites rushing to equip their police with body cameras. Fortunately, this possible murder was captured by at least two observers with cell phones. As of this writing, it’s not clear which version of the incident the videos will support. This is only one of countless recent police-civilian encouters in which videotapes either made a difference or would have been helpful.

By a body camera, I’m referring to a small camera that clips onto an officer’s uniform or eyeglasses and records audio and video of the officer’s interactions with the public. Although I am generally opposed to warrantless surveillance, in this case the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) refers to body cameras as a “win-win” because, if properly used, they can protect the public against abuse of power by the police while protecting the police from false accusations of brutality. Of course, there must be policies in place to prevent the police from selectively recording only certain interactions or parts of interactions, or from editing tapes after the fact. The ACLU recommends a set of policies to protect the public from this and other abuses of the technology.

However, there is a drawback of the use of this technology that so far seems to have escaped the notice of the mass media. A body camera records an interaction from a particular point of view—that of the police officer. There is evidence from social psychology that visual perspective can alter the salience of people and their actions, and this can affect the conclusions that people draw.

tayler-and-fiske-1975-fae_edited-1In a 1975 experiment, Shelley Taylor and Susan Fiske staged a conversation between two people, and placed observers at various locations around the room, as indicated in the diagram. Afterwards, the observers were asked to rate the amount of causal influence that each speaker exerted during the conversation. The results showed that the observers attributed greater causality to the person they were facing. Observers C and F saw Actor B as more influential, Observers D and A favored Actor A, and Observers B and E, who could see both actors equally well, tended to see them as equally important. This phenomenon is sometimes called illusory causation. People attribute greater causality to a person simply because he or she is more salient or noticeable than other people.

When an interaction is videotaped from different locations, the effect is called camera perspective bias. Daniel Lassiter and Audrey Irvine staged an interrogation in which a detective questioned a suspect, with the suspect eventually confessing to a crime. Three cameras simultaneously filmed the interaction, one looking over the detective’s shoulder, another over the suspect’s shoulder, and a third from the side with both the detective and the suspect equally visible. Observers were shown one of the three tapes and asked how voluntary the confession was. The confession was judged to be most voluntary—that is, caused by the suspect—when the camera was focused on the suspect and least voluntary—caused by the detective—when it was focused on the detective.

Lassiter and his colleagues have replicated this result several times, including under quite realistic conditions. In one study, they staged a mock trial and played jurors a videotaped confession filmed from one of the three perspectives. Not only was the confession seen as more voluntary when the focus was on the suspect, participants were more likely to find him guilty and recommend a longer sentence. Most police departments record confessions with the camera focused on the suspect.

These studies have implications for the police use of body cameras. The videotapes become important when there is an altercation between a police officer and a civilian suspect leading to some adverse outcome, such as the suspect being shot. Observers of the video must assign responsiblity under circumstances that may be quite ambiguous. When the camera is focued on the suspect, he or she will be more likely to be seen to have caused the bad outcome. Any aggressive behavior by the suspect is captured by the camera, while nonverbal behavior by the officer that is obnoxious or threatening can go unseen and become difficult to prove. The body camera is not a neutral observer of the interaction. It is biased in favor of the police officer.

A dashcam—a camera mounted on the dashboard of a patrol car—can  provide a more objective view of a police-civilian encounter, provided that both participants are visible. So too can a video taken by an observer with a cell phone. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist Tony Norman recommends that everyone carry a cell phone and record every encounter they have with the police. He gives an example of a black motorist who used this tactic to embarrass a policeman who was harassing him. However, this approach is not without its risks, as police have been known to charge people who try to videotape them with a crime. If you wind up in jail or in a hospital, the fact that you had a legal right to record the interaction may provide little comfort.

I’m in favor of police body cameras. They’re a clear improvement over the status quo. However, camera perspective bias needs to be more widely publicized and better understood.

Power and Corruption, Part 2

Politics, Social psychology,

Please read Part 1.

The experiments described by Antonakis and his colleagues involve interactions between leaders and one or more followers. Corruption occurs when leaders take more money for themselves, leaving less for their followers. In order to qualify as corrupt, the leaders’ actions must destroy public wealth; that is, the amounts taken by the leaders must be less than the amounts lost by the followers. This analysis strikes me as incomplete, since it views corruption as only involving two parties, leaders and followers. Some corruption fits this model. For example, a public official may embezzle public funds (although, in this case, there may be no loss of public wealth, since the amount gained by the leader probably equals the amount lost by the followers). However, in the most interesting cases of corruption, third parties are involved.

In this video, Dr. Aaron Carroll discusses research on conflicts of interest among medical doctors.

Let’s consider the case in which doctors receive benefits from drug companies, such as meals, travel, honorariums for speaking, grants for research, or part-ownership of companies. Studies cited by Carroll show that they are more likely to prescribe drugs sold by those companies. In some cases, the doctors may prescribe that company’s drugs rather than an equally-priced competitor’s product. However, they could also prescribe patented drugs rather than their cheaper generic equivalents, or even unnecessary drugs. There is destruction of public wealth if (as I suspect) the extra amount patients spend for higher priced or unnecessary drugs exceeeds the value of the benefits received by the doctors.

Here’s a political example involving corporate welfare. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker recently signed a bill giving away $250 million in public funds to the owners of the Milwaukee Bucks pro basketball team to build a $500 million arena. It was simultaneously revealed that Jon Hammes, a minority owner of the team, had donated $150,000 to a PAC supporting Walker for President. Of course, the situation is more complicated than that. Not only the Governor but the majority of the Legislature had to approve the giveaway. It is likely that other contributions were made by Milwaukee Bucks owners to Governor Walker and members of the Legislature.

Governor Walker justified the expenditure on the grounds that the team threatened to leave Milwaukee if the state didn’t pay up. He said it prevented the loss of $6.5 million per year in state taxes paid by the team and its players. (At that rate, it should pay for itself in only 38.5 years.) In all likelihood, this was an empty threat designed to give political cover to Walker and his merry band of athletic supporters, although this would be difficult to prove. It can also be argued that the citizens of Wisconsin will receive more than just tax revenue from the new arena. Some of them will receive the enjoyment of watching basketball games (although they will pay dearly for the privilege), the bars across the street from the arena will sell more beer, etc. Nevertheless, if we could quantify all these costs and benefits, the bottom line would probably show considerable destruction of public wealth.

By coincidence, Governor Walker and the legislature cut $250 million from the University of Wisconsin’s appropriation this year.

One way of looking at these examples is to ask: If there is destruction of public wealth, where does it go? In the Antonakis experiments, it disappears into thin air. This is built into the pay schedules devised by the experimenters. In the real world, that wealth goes to third parties.

I suggest that a typical case of public corruption looks something like this:

  • A donor or group of donors pays a relatively small amount in benefits to a leader or group of leaders.
  • The leaders take an action or series of actions which result in their followers paying a much larger amount to the donors.
  • The difference between the two amounts (Antonakis’ “destruction of public wealth”) is the profit to the donor.

Implied in the above is that not only are the leaders corrupt, but also the donors, and that the donors derive more profit from their corruption than the leaders do. If this were not the case, they would no longer continue to donate. By concentrating on leaders and followers, the Antonakis research lets those corporations and rich individuals that comprise the donor class off the hook.

The three party (leader-follower-donor) model proposed here is an oversimplification. In the case of political corruption, at least two other groups of actors are involved: campaign finance organizations, such as political action committees, and lobbyists. The donors seldom pay the leaders directly, but contribute to campaign finance organizations controlled by the leaders. The purpose of this is to avoid the appearance of quid pro quo corruption, which might meet the legal definition of bribery. The lobbyists also transmit some benefits to the leaders, as when they attend their fund raisers, but their primary function is to tell the leaders what the donors expect them to do in exchange for the benefits they have received (or hope to receive). Since this occurs at a time and place removed from the original payment, it also helps to avoid the appearance of impropriety.

Free lunches and campaign contributions persist because they are good investments. The Sunlight Foundation, using public records, found that between 2007 and 2012, 200 of the most politically active American corporations spent $5.8 billion on campaign contributions and lobbying and received $4.4 trillion in federal business and support. That’s $760 for every for every dollar spent. Of course, not all of this is destruction of public wealth. The government purchases goods and services from some of these corporations. It would be difficult to determine how many of them are actually needed and whether they are fairly priced. It should also be noted that corporations receive other government benefits that the Sunlight Foundation could not quantify, including tax breaks and influence over trade agreements and labor and environmental regulations.

All of this is perfectly legal in the United States. In a future post, I’ll try to explain the difference between quid pro quo and dependence corruption, and how all but quid pro quo corruption came to be legal in this country.

You may also be interested in reading:

Power and Corruption, Part 1