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
Eugene Volokh is a First Amendment law professor at UCLA Law School and a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. He approaches campaign finance through a free-speech lens and treats Citizens United as an extension of a broader principle: speakers do not lose constitutional protection because they speak through organizations, including corporations and unions.
Thesis
A “corporate money distorts democracy” critique must be neutral and empirically grounded because the First Amendment protects independent political advocacy regardless of organizational form. The same concerns about influence apply to unions, tribes, nonprofits, media corporations, and even celebrity amplification.
Broadening the Scope
When we started our discussion, Volokh’s first move was to broaden the scope of my argument. He challenged the idea that corporate political spending should be treated as uniquely dangerous without accounting for other powerful speakers who shape elections and public opinion through similar mechanisms. If the concern is that money buys amplification, access, and influence, he argued, then that concern extends beyond business corporations to unions, nonprofits, ideological organizations, wealthy individuals, and especially media institutions. Any critique grounded in “money distorts democracy,” in his view, must apply symmetrically or risk appearing as selective skepticism toward certain speakers rather than a principled account of democratic equality.
That challenge forced me to clarify what I mean by “distortion.” My claim is not that corporations are the only powerful speakers in politics. It is that corporate influence often scales differently because it is embedded in regulated markets and directed toward policy outcomes with direct effects on firm value. This distinction matters because it shifts the inquiry away from whether corporations “have a right to speak” and toward how predictable incentive structures can turn political spending into an investment strategy. The core risk, in this frame, is not speech itself, but the dependency and agenda-setting power created by concentrated, recurring financing in policy domains with clear financial payoffs.
The Media Equivalence
Volokh pushed my argument to its hardest symmetry case: the media. His point was that media organizations are also for profit corporations, and they shape political outcomes through endorsements, story selection, framing, and tone. If those activities are protected under the First Amendment, he argued, it becomes difficult to justify treating non media corporations as uniquely suspect speakers without relying on a rule that effectively favors some speakers over others.
That part of the conversation helped me clarify what I am actually defending and what I am actually criticizing. I agree with Volokh’s baseline claim that the First Amendment protects a wide range of speakers, and I am not arguing for silencing viewpoints. The question for my project is not whether corporations should be allowed to participate in politics. The question is how certain influence mechanisms operate once money becomes concentrated, repeatable, and tied to high payoff policy domains. My focus is not persuasion as such. It is the governance risk that emerges when access and dependency begin to shape what issues rise to the top and what decisions become politically feasible.
Volokh applied the same symmetry logic to celebrities and other high attention figures. If the concern is simply that some voices are louder than others, then attention based amplification also matters. I take that seriously, and it forces me to define the harm more precisely. The distinction I am drawing is not that celebrities have no influence. It is that donor driven influence can be scaled and repeated through financial infrastructure across cycles, which can build durable dependency over time. Framed this way, I can incorporate Volokh’s symmetry critique without turning the project into a call to restrict the press or celebrity speech, while still keeping the analysis centered on the conditions under which influence becomes leverage in practice.
Control, Persuasion, and Dependency
The main disagreement Volokh and I shared was about what “control” actually means and who holds it. In his view, the shareholder analogy breaks at the point of enforcement. A 51 percent shareholder can ultimately drive outcomes through board power and voting rights. Donors cannot do that. Politicians still have to face voters, and that voter accountability is what prevents “donor influence” from being the same thing as formal control. He also drew a bright legal line that matters for how I write: if money is exchanged for an official act, that is bribery. So if I want to make an argument about influence, I cannot casually describe it as a direct trade or imply that regular political support automatically equals corruption.
The boundary helps me clarify my claim; I am not arguing that persuasion equals bribery, nor am I claiming that most political spending meets a quid pro quo standard. The mechanism I am focused on is dependency: when funding is concentrated and repeated across cycles, it can purchase privileged access and shape incentives in ways that narrow what becomes politically realistic, even without an explicit agreement. That is why I keep using the corporate control framework as an analogy, not a legal equivalence. The point is not that donors can issue orders. The point is that dependence can still produce predictable constraint.
To replace my ownership framework, Volokh offered a cleaner legal analogy: large donors are more like major customers than owners. Major customers can influence a company because the company does not want to lose them, but that does not mean the customer “owns” the firm. His broader point is that donor influence can be real and still fall short of legal control. I agree with that description as a legal distinction. However, I also think the customer analogy leaves me with a question: If we accept that a business will bend toward its biggest customers because it does not want to lose them, why would we assume a political system built on repeat fundraising pressure behaves differently?
One Final Reality Check
After testing the logic of my framework, Eugene Volokh pointed to the FEC cycle data as a way to pressure-test broad claims about “corporate dominance” and asked me to specify which category of political money I mean. The FEC’s 24-month summary for the 2023 to 2024 cycle reports that PACs raised about $15.7 billion and spent about $15.5 billion, while independent expenditures totaled about $4.4 billion (FEC). Within PACs, the FEC breaks out corporate and labor funds and shows a notable asymmetry: there are far more corporate PACs, but labor PACs report comparable total receipts. In the same period, corporate SSFs total 1,677 committees with about $390.5 million in receipts, while labor SSFs total 265 committees with about $402.4 million (FEC). Volokh’s point is that “who drives distortion” can look different depending on which channel you measure and whether you care about total volume or concentration.
His point was not that corporate influence is harmless, but that I cannot assume corporations dominate without specifying the channel and showing it in the data. If corporate PAC receipts look comparable to labor PAC receipts, and if corporate spending is not the lion’s share of overall election money, then my “scale” claim has to be more precise. The work I need to do next is to define which mechanism I mean, where corporate money is actually concentrated, and how it operates in practice. That means separating PAC contributions from independent expenditures and dark money vehicles, and then asking whether corporate influence shows up less in total dollars and more in repeatable leverage, access, and policy targeting in regulated industries. In other words, Volokh did not refute the concern, but raised the standard of proof for it.
What I Learned From Volokh
Volokh’s critique forces me to tighten both my language and my evidence. If I use the corporate ownership analogy, it cannot be a claim about legal authority. It has to be a metaphor for constraint, where repeated dependence on major funders can narrow what policymakers can realistically do without risking lost support, lost access, or outside spending. That also shapes what a defensible reform agenda looks like. If speaker based restrictions are constitutionally fragile, then the levers have to be structural and conduct based: stronger transparency, guardrails against access selling, clearer conflict of interest rules, and tighter enforcement against coordination and routed spending. The goal is not to silence anyone. It is to reduce how easily concentrated money turns into durable leverage.
Works Cited
Federal Election Commission. Statistical Summary of 24 Month Campaign Activity of the 2023–2024 Election Cycle.
Supreme Court of the United States. Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. 558 U.S. 310. 2010. University of California, Los Angeles School of Law. Eugene Volokh. Faculty profile. Volokh, Eugene. Interview by Nicole Davari. Personal interview