Nicole Davari '26 is an accounting major with a pathway in applied ethics, and she is a 2025-26 Hackworth Fellow at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at SA国际传媒. Views are her own.
Background
Anne Baker is a political scientist with a full-stack view of money in politics. In our interview, she explained that she has been a professor at SA国际传媒 for 11 years and is an associate professor with tenure. Her research focuses on money and politics, beginning with party and campaign funds and then extending to interest-group funds. Over the last decade, her main lane has been political donors and their impact on elections, and she is also studying how donors affect representation. She also has direct practitioner experience, including work in campaign politics on FEC reporting, and she has worked for a lobbying firm, which is why she said she has essentially covered “all the money angles.”
Thesis
Modern political influence is not just illegal quid pro quo. It is the broader reality that money can skew access and representation in ways that still damage democracy, especially because the mere appearance of corruption can undermine public trust in institutions. She argues that average citizens are not powerless; however, their influence has been meaningfully constrained by wealthier citizens and donor networks.
Influence Beyond the Legal Standard
What I noted early with Anne is that she refuses to reduce “influence” to whatever the courts can prove. She basically set up two different standards in the first minute. The Supreme Court’s standard is quid pro quo corruption, meaning you need evidence of an explicit trade. But her standard is democratic. Even if nothing technically illegal is occurring, the appearance of corruption still harms because it undermines faith in institutions and elected officials, and that loss of trust is a serious problem for democracies. That framing matters to my project because it validates something people feel but struggle to “prove.” The public can experience a system as compromised even when the law cannot prosecute it.
The Citizen Power Reality Check
She also gave me a reality check that felt honest instead of dramatic. She did not say average citizens have zero influence. She said their impact has been “significantly curbed” by wealthier citizens and, to some extent, by special interests, depending on the policy area. Then she made it more nuanced. Congress is not entirely unresponsive to constituents, but it is difficult to determine exactly where we are on the spectrum, and this varies by member, as members have different ethical orientations and different comfort levels with donors. When I pressed for something more concrete, she noted that she does not have a clean metric for it and has not conducted a study specifically to quantify it. That is essentially her saying: the system is not totally captured, but it is tilted toward wealth, and it is hard to prove exactly how much because the data does not let you measure it cleanly.
Citizens United, Dark Money, and why Transparency is the Real Fix
When we got into Citizens United, Anne broke it down in a way that made the mechanics click. She separated the funds that go directly into a candidate’s campaign from the funds that sit outside the campaign but still shape the election. Direct donations to candidates remain regulated as hard money, subject to contribution limits and disclosure requirements. What Citizens United did was supercharge the outside lane by reinforcing that independent spending can be unlimited as long as it is not coordinated with the campaign. Then she layered in SpeechNow as the fast follow that made the model scalable, because it clarified that these independent spending groups can also accept unlimited contributions, which is the core logic behind the modern super PAC ecosystem.
Influence can expand without “breaking the rules” in the traditional sense; if hard money is the lane with limits, then independent spending is the lane that can scale almost without friction. Once you understand that, your whole standard for “proof” changes. Instead of treating corruption like a crime scene where you need one clean receipt, you start seeing influence as a system design problem. The legal structure creates a set of incentives and routes that make specific outcomes more likely, even if no one ever says the quiet part out loud. If unlimited money can be deployed in the “independent” lane, then donors do not need to negotiate a direct deal with a candidate. They can invest in the candidate's environment. They can fund ads that shape the agenda, define opponents, and decide what voters see nonstop versus what never breaks through. They can keep a candidate viable, or make a race uncompetitive, without ever writing a check to the campaign itself.
That is how power accumulates. It moves from a direct transaction model into an ecosystem model. Candidates and parties learn which types of spending will appear on their behalf and which will appear against them, and they adjust their behavior before anything explicit occurs. That is not coordination on paper. It is an adaptation under pressure. The system ultimately rewards politicians who do not antagonize the funding networks that can flood a race, and punishes those who do, even in the absence of a formal agreement. Then you layer in the dark-money pathway Anne mentioned, where money can move through social welfare groups into super PAC spending, and the public loses the ability to trace who is driving what clearly. Thus, the accountability mechanism that is supposed to protect democracy and voter knowledge weakens as the scale of influence increases.
Corporate Influence is a Portfolio, not a Single Lever
Anne made corporate influence feel less like a conspiracy and more like an operating model with multiple channels, constraints, and tradeoffs. She said corporate money “tends to move policy like an ocean liner”. It pushes the direction of travel over time rather than flipping a vote overnight. Hence, the impact is reflected in the overall direction of policy over time, rather than in a single donation leading to a specific bill. That is why people keep looking for a smoking gun and keep coming up empty. The influence is real, but it builds slowly and spreads across lots of decisions.
She also made an important point that is easy to miss: corporations are not a single unified group. Different industries seek different objectives and compete with one another, so no single interest always controls everything. But she was also clear that the real issue is fairness. Corporations should be heard because they possess expertise, and lawmakers need input from groups such as hospitals and pharmaceutical companies when writing healthcare policy. The problem is that access is not equal. Some groups have constant representation in Washington, while others have no one advocating for them. She noted that few organizations lobby daily on behalf of homeless people, whereas the oil lobby is consistently present. That imbalance is where distortion comes from.
How Lobbying Works and why the Biggest Wins are Invisible
Anne described lobbying as relationship infrastructure rather than a one-time pressure campaign. In practice, she said that lobbyists, not just congressional staffers, draft much legislative language, because lobbyists build long-term relationships and bring expertise that offices often lack the time or staffing to develop on their own. They provide research, draft policy language, and, over time, perform free policy work, creating a steady reliance that compounds.
For my project, this is significant because it reframes influence as capacity rather than persuasion. If one side consistently writes, briefs, and provides “ready to use” language, that side is not merely pushing for a specific vote. They are shaping the menu of options before a vote even exists. They can define the problem, set the boundaries of what sounds feasible, and quietly build in assumptions that tilt outcomes in their direction. Over time, that changes what lawmakers consider normal, what staff treat as technically viable, and what the public ever gets to debate in the first place.
Then she gave me the point I keep returning to: the biggest lobbying wins are often what never happens. She said corporations block stuff, and that lobbying success can mean preventing outcomes, which is incredibly hard to measure because you are trying to prove a non-event. She basically raised the question of attribution: If nothing happened, was it because the issue resolved on its own, because the public interest prevailed, or because a well-resourced actor quietly stopped it? She even framed “what has not happened” as a signal of corporate influence. That explains why the public can sense something is off but struggles to point to clean receipts. If influence looks like stalled regulation, delayed oversight, or bills that never move, the evidence is silence, and silence only becomes visible when you zoom out and see the pattern.
The Plumbing Most People Never Learn About
This part of the interview felt less like a scandal and more like a control problem. Anne stated that lobbying regulation is not enforced effectively and that one issue concerns the definition of lobbying. There are real problems with how we decide who counts as a lobbyist and how that gets registered. If the definition is loose and enforcement is inconsistent, the public record will miss activity that still matters. That is why she said stricter rules would help, including restrictions on members lobbying after leaving Congress.
She then described a research direction that changed how I think about influence after someone leaves office. Members can leave Congress, retain leftover campaign funds, and later use them legally to exert lobbying influence. She gave the example of using that money to support the members they are lobbying on behalf of. It is not the kind of thing most people picture when they hear the word lobbying, but it can still shape access and relationships.
Leadership PACs are another piece of that infrastructure. Anne said there is effectively no limit on how many leadership PACs a member can have, and that they can be used like a slush fund, even though most members run only one or two because it is hard to manage more. The main takeaway for me is that these are legal structures that can keep money and access connected over time. That creates a vulnerability in the influence-control environment by blurring the line between public service and private leverage.
What makes this so overlooked is that it sits in the space between what is illegal and what is familiar. It is technical; it resides in filings and rule definitions, and it does not map cleanly onto the narratives people tell about corruption. It also benefits from complexity. The more categories, entities, and exceptions the system has, the more difficult it is for voters and even journalists to track developments in real time. It also raises questions about why this structure exists in the first place. Is it there because lawmakers need flexibility to run campaigns and support colleagues? Is it there because reform is hard when the people who would need to change the rules are also the ones using the current system? Is it there because enforcement agencies are under-resourced or politically constrained? Or, is it there because the legal boundary is designed to target direct quid pro quo behavior, leaving a large gray zone untouched?
The questions we need to keep asking here are practical. What is the purpose of leftover campaign funds, and what are the legitimate uses versus the influence-maximizing uses? Why are leadership PAC limits so loose, and what would a reasonable guardrail look like without restricting regular political activity? Who benefits from the current definitions of lobbying, and who is left out of disclosure? If the public cannot trace influence, can elections still function as a form of accountability, or do voters end up voting in an information fog? And finally, if the appearance of corruption is itself a democratic harm, what level of transparency is required to maintain legitimacy?
Why Pelissero and Baker fit Together
Once I place Anne Baker’s arguments next to John Pelissero's, the contrast becomes the structure of my argument for this project. In the interview with John, the facts were more a matter of moral standards; he grounds the entire conversation in what government is for, hence our discussion of the “ultimate goal of
the government”. From there, legitimacy becomes the test, and we need to ask ourselves: Is this what the Founding Fathers would have wanted? Government is legitimate when it serves people broadly, not when it serves the best-resourced persons first or most consistently. John also treats transparency as ethical, not
optional, especially around dark money, which is also consistent with Anne’s argument. When funding sources are hidden, it becomes easier to manipulate the public conversation and more complicated for citizens to hold anyone accountable, which leads to distrust.
Anne Baker provides the mechanisms that explain why the ethical problem persists even in the absence of proof. She lays out the legal and institutional structures that allow influence to scale without appearing to be a direct exchange. She explains how it accumulates through access, long-term relationships, and the ability to shape agendas early, before issues ever reach a vote. She also points out that some of the most important “wins” occur through blocked outcomes, meaning influence can manifest as what does not happen, which is the hardest to measure.
Together, they let me make a stronger argument than either one alone.
Works Cited:
Baker, Anne. Interview with Nicole Davari. 1 Dec. 2025.
Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. 558 U.S. 310. Supreme Court of the United States. 21 Jan. 2010.
McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission. 572 U.S. 185. Supreme Court of the United States. 2 Apr. 2014.
Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. “A Framework for Ethical Decision Making.” SA国际传媒. /ethics/ethical-decision-framework/
Pelissero, John P. Personal interview. 17 Nov. 2025.
SpeechNow.org v. Federal Election Commission. 599 F.3d 686 (D.C. Cir. 2010) (en banc). 26 Mar. 2010.