Since 2008, the number of people making small monetary donations to political causes in the United States has “skyrocketed” (Schlozman et al. Reference Schlozman, Brady and Verba2018, 51; see also Greenwood Reference Greenwood2018; Stein Reference Stein2017). Presidents Obama (in 2012) and Trump (in 2016) received more small donations than any U.S. presidential candidates in history (Campaign Finance Institute 2017). ActBlue has collected more than $6 billion for Democratic candidates and causes since 2004; in August 2020 alone, more than four million people donated a total of $485 million via more than 10.5 million donations to Act Blue; these donations averaged a little under $46 (ActBlue 2020). In the 2010 mid-term elections, Tea Party candidates Christine O’Donnell and Sharron Angle raised 45% and 58% of their campaign funds, respectively, from small donations (Attkisson Reference Attkisson2010). The average donation to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s primary campaign in 2018 was $22 (Muller Reference Muller2018). Forty-five percent of the money that Donald Trump raised in the 2020 election cycle came from small donors (Montemayor et al. Reference Montemayor, Quist, Evers-Hillstrom and Weber2020).
This trend is not limited to campaign contributions. After Trump’s election in 2016, “rage giving” of mostly small donations to political action committees (PACs) and civil society organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union and Planned Parenthood broke all records (Associated Press 2016; Gidda Reference Gidda2017). In 2020, in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd, record numbers of small donors contributed to anti-racist organizations and organizations fighting police violence (Goldmacher Reference Goldmacher2020; Mathey and Quick Reference Mathey and Quick2020).Footnote 1
There have been two main responses to this explosion of small-money political donating. On one hand, many critics of “big money” in politics are elated. They celebrate these donations because they are small, viewing them as a form of democratically legitimate political participation that is “healthy for its own sake” (Corrado et al Reference Corrado, Malbin, Mann and Ornstein2010), a potential “antidote” to big money in politics (Tausanovitch and Lagasse Reference Tausanovitch and Lagasse2018), or a basis for a possible “small donor democracy” (Cmar Reference Cmar2005). For example, Bernie Sanders, an ardent critic of big money in politics, led chants of “twenty-seven dolluhs”—the average size of donations to his 2016 Democratic primary campaign—at his campaign rallies (Megarian Reference Megerian2016). For these critics of big money in politics smallness is crucial, because small donations don’t enact political inequality or incentivize corruption, and because smallness is an indicator of who is donating: ordinary, non-wealthy people.Footnote 2
On the other hand, many proponents of small-scale democratic political action are suspicious of small-money political donations. They criticize, or at best ignore, these donations because they are monetary. Comparing small-money political donating not to big money in politics but rather to non-monetary forms of small-scale political action, they view small-money political donating as festering shiftily at the bottom of the participation hierarchy, below voting, public speaking, and protest. In particular, many proponents of small-scale political action view small-money political donating as less involved, educative, authentic, and egalitarian than these non-monetary forms of small-scale political action. For example, Schlozman et al. (Reference Schlozman, Brady and Verba2018, 24) describe voting as “the most fundamental democratic act” and “first among equals” among different types of political voice, including donating. They add that “when individuals use time to express political voice, they act on their own behalf and do not hire a Cyrano to compose an e-mail to a public official or a mercenary to march in a protest” (Schlozman, Brady, and Verba Reference Schlozman, Brady and Verba2018, 25).Footnote 3 The New England Town meeting is often seen as the “purest ideal of democracy put into practice” (Mansbridge Reference Mansbridge1976). Livingston (Reference Livingston2017) argues that there is an “immense, intangible value” to in-person protests, even when they “fail” in tactical terms, because they teach people how to be political. Correspondingly, while democratic theorists have written extensively and glowingly about non-monetary forms of political action such as voting, deliberation (Cohen Reference Cohen2002), agonistic speech (Mouffe Reference Mouffe2005), and (un)civil disobedience (King Reference King2000; Delmas Reference Delmas2018), they have said almost nothing about small-money political donating.
The foregoing two perspectives on small-money political donating can be conceptualized along two axes: a “vertical” perspective that holds medium (i.e., money) constant, focuses on size (big versus small), and celebrates small-money political donations because they are small, and a “horizontal” perspective that holds size (i.e., small) constant, focuses on medium (monetary versus non-monetary), and denigrates or ignores small-money political donations because they are monetary. While logically compatible, these two perspectives are very different. Yet neither addresses a crucial question: how might the monetariness of small-money political donating contribute to its democratic potential? In other words, can small-money political donating be good for democracy, not only because it is small, but also because it is monetary?
The answer, I argue in this article, is yes.Footnote 4 Indeed, the distinctive democratic potentialFootnote 5 of small-money political donating derives significantly from money’s distinctive features: money is mobile—it can be moved long distances quickly at little to no cost; it is divisible—it can easily be divided into units of many different sizes, including very small units; it is commensurable—it can be exchanged for a wide range of non-monetary things, and it is fungible—once agglomerated, previously discrete amounts of money become impossible to differentiate. Together, these features make small-money political donating potentially accessible, non-intrusive, and collective. In the context of small-money political donating, these three norms are both democratic (in the sense of being conducive to collective self-rule on equal terms) and normatively attractive.
To be clear, my claim is not that small-money political donating is normatively superior to, or more democratic than, non-monetary forms of small-scale political action. Rather, I argue that small-money political donating has democratic potential that has gone overlooked, because this potential derives from its monetariness, rather than its smallness. While monetariness and smallness are connected (in ways that I discuss further later), I focus on monetariness because, again, its democratic potential has been discounted.
I will suggest that the democratic potential of money in the context of small-money political donating comes from its distinctiveness as a medium of small-scale political action. Because of this distinctiveness, small-money political donating compensates for the limitations, rather than replicates the strengths, of non-monetary media of political action, such as voting, speech, and marching. In this respect (and others), my account differs from Ackerman and Ayres’ “Patriot Dollars” proposal for campaign finance reform, which emphasizes similarities between donating money and voting (Reference Ackerman and Ayres2004, 25). Instead, I follow the lead of some anti-racist activists. These activists implicitly invoke money’s distinctiveness—in particular, its non-intrusiveness—when they argue that small-money political donating is an especially apt way for white people to combat white supremacy because in so doing they materially empower, without displacing or controlling, Black and brown movement leaders (Stewart Reference Stewart2020). I build on, elucidate, and generalize this type of insight, by exploring how specific characteristics of money as a medium help make small money political donating potentially democratic.
In making these arguments I draw on numerous examples, two of which I note here and discuss more extensively later. Rather than being representative cases, these examples are intended to illustrate the democratic potential of small-money political donating. The first example is a crowdfunding campaign that was launched in 2018 to raise campaign funds for an eventual challenger to Maine Senator Susan Collins, if Collins voted to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court. As of November 2020, 130,727 people had collectively donated $4,126,393 to the fund, which was eventually handed over to Sara Gideon, Collins’ challenger (who lost).Footnote 6 The second example is small-money political donations to the Philadelphia Vigilant (or sometimes “Vigilance”) Committee, one of several inter-racial, cross-class, and sometimes mixed-gender radical abolitionist organizations that operated in several U.S. cities between about 1830 and 1860. While the crowdfunding campaign is a mainstream initiative situated within conventional liberal democratic electoral politics, donations to the Philadelphia Vigilant Committee exemplify how small-money political donating can be a form of radical, insurgent, democratic political action.
In the next section I situate my argument within the broader literature on money and politics. I then explain what small money political donating is, how it functions, and how the constitutive features of money shape its democratic potential. Next, I discuss the limitations of small money political donating, some broader implications of the argument, and conclude.
Money and/as Politics
How, and under what conditions, do putatively economic (i.e., market or money-based) activities function politically—and even democratically? Scholars have examined this question in the context of consumer boycotts (Bröckerhoff and Qassoum Reference Bröckerhoff and Qassoum2019), strikes (Gourevitch Reference Gourevitch2018), and market exchange (Eich Reference Eich2019), among others. I examine it in the context of small money political donating.
While some scholarship on this topic equates money and economy, I draw on Wendy Brown’s recent efforts to distinguish them. Brown criticizes what she calls “economization,” by which she means “a process of remaking the knowledge, form, content, and conduct appropriate to [other] spheres and practices” in ways that lead people to “think and act like contemporary market subjects” (Brown Reference Brown2015, 31). More specifically, Brown argues that “neoliberal reason … is converting the distinctly political character, meaning, and operation of democracy’s constituent elements into economic ones” (Brown Reference Brown2015, 17; emphasis in original). What gets lost as a result of this process, Brown suggests, are “distinctly human capacities for ethical and political freedom, creativity, unbounded reflection, or invention” (Brown Reference Brown2015, 43).
Because small-money political donating involves money, it seems at first to exemplify this tendency toward economization. By reducing democratic politics to an instrumental economic transaction, it encourages us to view political participation as—in the words of one commentator—“political retail therapy” that might or might not have a high “return on investment” (Stieb Reference Stieb2018). Crucially, however, Brown distinguishes “economization” from “monetization” (Brown Reference Brown2015, 31). She draws this distinction in order to argue that there can be economization without monetization: people can, for example, approach their dating life in an economized way, even if no money changes hands (Brown Reference Brown2015, 31). But this conceptual distinction also leaves space for the opposite possibility: monetization without economization. Thus, even though she does not explore it (and indeed seems dubious about it), Brown’s conceptual framework opens up the central question of this article: how, if at all, can what is usually seen as an economic and economizing medium—money—be deployed politically, and even democratically?Footnote 7
In taking up this question, I address Brown’s concern about economization, by showing that small-money political donating is not necessarily economizing, but can instead enact the creative, insurgent, democratic politics that Brown sees as economization’s opposite. Indeed, once we distinguish conceptually between money on the one hand, and economization and neoliberal rationality on the other, we can search out contexts in which the former is used to combat the latter. But I also go beyond Brown’s concerns, by elucidating both limitations of small-money political donating besides economization, and other democratic potentialities of small-money political donating besides avoiding economization.Footnote 8
While much has been written about small-money political donating within the context of electoral politics, scholars have said much less about it outside this domain. But just as big-money donations outside of electoral politics can be political—e.g., “mega-philanthropy” in areas such as education and global public health by people such as Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates (Saunders-Hastings Reference Saunders-Hastings2017)—small donations to groups and causes at some remove from electoral politics, such as the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, can also be political by, among other things, influencing public policy and public opinion, and helping to mobilize other forms of political action.
By studying small-money donating both within and beyond election campaigns, we can get out from under the shadow of campaign finance reform, which—as vitally important of an issue as it is—directs attention narrowly to the problem of big money in electoral politics and how small-money political donating can help solve it. Rather than focus on this vertical axis of big money versus small money, I look horizontally, comparing small-money political donating to non-monetary forms of small-scale political action, such as speech, voting, and protest. In so doing, I examine the democratic potential and limits of small-money political donating in a way that is analogous to how scholars approach these other forms of small-scale political action, including by evaluating it on the basis of its overall democratic potential, not whether it can solve one specific problem (i.e., big money in politics).
Small-Money Political Donating
I turn next to explaining what I mean by “small-money political donating.” Rather than specify criteria by which all phenomena can be definitively ruled in or out of this category, I offer a conception that acknowledges fuzzy boundaries and borderline cases. By donations, I mean resource transfers for public or other-regarding purposes shared by donors and recipients.Footnote 9 Donations are political if they pertain to issues of large-scale or public concern, within or outside of electoral politics.Footnote 10 More specifically, donations are political if they are directed to political entities or causes, send a political message, or influence political outcomes.
The category of political donations therefore includes donations to entities that are primarily or directly involved in electoral politics, including candidates, parties, PACs, and many 501(c)4 advocacy organizations, such as Planned Parenthood and the NRA. It also includes donations to entities that are not directly involved in electoral politics but are political in their activities or framing of the issues, such as some 501(c)5 organizations, e.g., Industrial Workers of the World, and some 501(c)3 organizations, e.g., Breast Cancer Action Network and Black Lives Matter Global Foundation.Footnote 11 In addition, it includes donations to entities that express political ideas, even if they use the donations they receive for humanitarian or private purposes, e.g., donations to crowdfunding campaigns to pay the expenses of Michael Brown’s family after police officer Darren Wilson killed Brown in Ferguson, Missouri (Cohen Reference Cohen2014). Finally, I construe as political donations to entities that send an implicit political message, even if they formally describe themselves as apolitical, e.g., Angeles del Desierto, which provides food and water to people attempting to cross the border from Mexico to the United States, and mega-churches led by preachers who make politically-valenced public statements.Footnote 12
Because big-money political donations are widely seen as objectionably undemocratic because they are big, the question of what makes a monetary political donation small is especially fraught. For present purposes, I conceptualize political donations as small if, due to their size, they avoid the normative problems that plague big money political donations, including corruption and disproportionate influence (however these are specified). I start with this conceptual specification of “small,” rather than a dollar amount, because the point of this article is to examine the democratic potential of monetary political donations that avoid the criticisms frequently lodged against big money in politics (Pevnick Reference Pevnick2016; Dawood Reference Dawood2015). This conceptual specification of “small” also tracks ordinary usage; in the contemporary United States, calling a donation “small”—whether it is $3 or $200—typically implies that it avoids the normative pitfalls of big-money donations.
How small must donations be, in dollar terms, to meet this criterion? The answer depends on several factors, including which normative objection(s) to big-money political donations one is seeking to avoid. For example, $200 usually can’t buy preferential access to a candidate (Pildes Reference Pildes2019), so $200 donations usually aren’t vulnerable to what I will call the “intrusiveness” objection. However, $200 is more than many people can afford, so $200 donations are often vulnerable to what I call the “inaccessibility” objection (Pevnick Reference Pevnick2016).Footnote 13 However, whether a given donation is actually vulnerable to the inaccessibility objection depends on context: while a $200 donation would almost certainly be vulnerable to the inaccessibility objection in a local municipal election in Wilcox County, Alabama, where the median household income was around $27,000 in 2018 (United States Census Bureau n.d.), it might not be vulnerable to this objection in Louden County, Virginia, where the median household income in 2019 was almost $140,000 (Cline Reference Cline2019). Judgments about which donations are too big to be accessible are further informed by views about a) who should have a say in any given decision in the first place (itself an ongoing debate within democratic theory [Bauböck Reference Bauböck2018]),Footnote 14 and b) what percentage of the population must be able to afford a donation for it to be deemed accessible to that population. For concreteness, I will stipulate that $20 is usually small enough to avoid most of the problems attributed to big-money political donations in most of the United States most of the time, but nothing in my analysis hinges on this specific number.Footnote 15
Turning, finally, to what makes small political donations monetary, I focus on four features of modern, capitalist money that shape small-money political donating in the contemporary United States.Footnote 16 First, this type of money is highly divisible; it can easily be divided up into precisely sized units and very small units (Simmel Reference Simmel, Frisby, Bottomore and Frisby2004, 292). For example, many donors to the crowdfunding campaign for Collins’ challenger donated a precise amount: $20.20, a reference to the year Collins was up for re-election. The smallest allowable donation to the campaign was also very small: $1.00.
Second, money is highly mobile, compared to people and most in-kind goods (Overton Reference Overton2012). Using electronic banking and other technologies, money can be transferred almost anywhere almost instantaneously, at low or no cost (though, importantly, some such transfers are illegal). As a result, eligible donors anywhere in the United States could easily contribute to the campaign for Collins’ challenger. While some non-monetary forms of political action, such as commenting on social media, are also highly mobile, many others, such as street protesting and attending in-person meetings, are not.
Finally, money is commensurable and fungible. While these terms are sometimes used interchangeably, I here use “commensurability” to refer to the range of things that money can buy in a particular context (Heard Reference Heard1960; Smith Reference Smith1997, 90; Espeland and Stevens Reference Espeland and Stevens1998). Because money is commensurable, it was possible to raise funds for Collins’ eventual challenger before that person (Sara Gideon) was identified, and for Gideon, once she received the money, to use it to do many different things. I use “fungibility” to refer to the melding together of donations from different donors that are deposited into the same “pot,” such as donations to the campaign for Collins’ challenger.
How Small-Money Political Donating Functions: Empowerment and Expression
Small-money political donating functions politically in two main ways. Most obviously, small donors empower recipients by transferring purchasing power to them. This empowerment dimension of small-money political donating is closely tied to donation size: the more money a donor donates to a recipient, the more purchasing power is transferred to that recipient, and the more the recipient is empowered.Footnote 17 Donating money only amounts to a meaningful transfer of purchasing power when it enables recipients to buy what they want or need, which in turn depends on contextual factors.
In addition to empowering recipients, small-money political donations also typically express something, such as support for the recipient.Footnote 18 Compared to their empowerment dimension, the expressive dimension of donations is less correlated to donation size: a $10 donation to the World Wildlife Fund—or the KKK— conveys about as much support as a $75 donation does. These expressions of support are less articulate than an e-mail or phone call, but more targeted than voting, because they can be given repeatedly to a single recipient or numerous recipients at any time and in response to unfolding events.
Several other aspects of small-money political donations can matter for their expressive dimension but not their empowerment dimension. For example, donors’ identities, whether they remain anonymous, the precise timing of their donations, whether and how donations are publicized, and whether donations are accompanied by a written message all tend to affect the expressive, but not the empowerment, dimensions of donations. Conversely, whether and how the recipient is able to spend a donation matters for its empowerment dimension, but not its expressive dimension.
Small-money political donating can also empower the recipient in a second way: not by transferring resources, but rather by conferring democratic legitimacy. Democratic legitimacy comes from, among other things, the un-coerced support of large numbers of ordinary people. Having many small donors (or, though it is not the same thing, receiving many small donations) can have concrete political effects when it is viewed as a marker of democratic legitimacy or popular support. For example, in 2019 the Democratic National Committee used the number of small-money donors contributing to each candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination as a criterion to decide which candidates would get to participate in nationally televised debates (Siders Reference Siders2019).Footnote 19
Size isn’t Everything: Small Money Political Donating as Potentially Democratic Political Action
I turn next to showing how the mobility, divisibility, fungibility, and commensurability of money help make small-money political donating potentially accessible, non-intrusive, and collective, with regard to both its empowerment and expressive dimensions. I also explain why, in the context of small-money donating, these three norms are both democratic and normatively attractive. Proponents of small-money political donating often argue that it is accessible, non-intrusive, and collective because donations are small, whereas big-money political donations are inaccessible, intrusive, and atomistic because donations are big. I agree that small-money political donations are indeed accessible, non-intrusive, and collective. However, this is not only because they are small, but also, and in different ways, because they are monetary.
How Monetariness Makes Small-Money Political Donating Accessible
Accessibility is a democratic norm when it contributes to collective self-rule, on equal terms, by everyone who should have a say. For critics of big money in politics, it is the smallness of small-money political donations that makes them accessible: while big donations are accessible only to the wealthy, small(er) donations are (more) accessible to the poor (Kalla and Broockman Reference Kalla and Broockman2015).Footnote 20 From this perspective, the notion that the monetariness of small-money political donations make them accessible seems absurd. If anything, monetariness limits the accessibility of small-money political donating, because people with no money can’t donate.
However, if we compare small-money political donating not to big-money political donating, but rather to non-monetary forms of small-scale political action—that is, if we shift from the vertical to the horizontal perspective—a different part of the picture comes into focus. While smallness makes small-money political donations more accessible than big donations to people who are poor, monetariness makes small-money political donations more accessible than non-monetary forms of small-scale political action to people confronting other forms of exclusion. This is so because of money’s mobility, which bridges various kinds of distance, and money’s divisibility, which makes very small donations possible.
How money’s mobility makes small-money political donating accessible. Because money is mobile, small-money political donating can bridge physical distance. In-person forms of political activity such as protesting can be entirely inaccessible or too dangerous or costly to access for all sorts of reasons: illness, disability, care-giving or work responsibilities, immigration status, lack of transportation, an ongoing pandemic, or simply living too far away from where protest is occurring. Under these circumstances, individuals can sometimes express support for a cause or empower those working to promote that cause by donating instead. Planned Parenthood’s motto, “I stand with Planned Parenthood,” reflects this idea of donating money as a functional alternative to bodily co-presence.Footnote 21
Likewise, because donating money is a relatively inarticulate form of expression, small-money political donating can bridge social distance. It can function as an effective form of expression for people who are reticent to speak in public or who face what Iris Young calls “internal exclusion” because other people “ignore or dismiss or patronize their statements and expressions” due to their speaking style or other attributes (Young Reference Young2002, 55; see also Fricker Reference Fricker, Fantl, McGrath and Sosa2019 on testimonial injustice).Footnote 22 While voting is also accessible to those who are socially excluded in these ways, and absentee voting is accessible to people who are homebound, voting is, as noted earlier, less flexible and precise than small-money political donating.
Finally, unlike voting, donating can bridge the “legal distance” experienced by people who are formally disenfranchised because they are (for example) foreign nationals, under 18, or have felony convictions. Small-money political donating can also help overcome the legal distance experienced by people who are de facto disenfranchised by laws that make it more difficult to vote, gerrymandered House districts, and political institutions that entrench inequality (e.g., the U.S. Senate). For example, critics might object to the crowdfunding campaign for the challenger to Senator Collins on the grounds that only residents of Maine should be able to influence Collins. But because Maine voters have more per-person political power in the Senate than residents of more populous states, residents of more populous states influencing Collins via small-money donations is not necessarily a shift away from political equality, especially given that Collins’ vote on Kavanaugh was so consequential at a national level.Footnote 23 More generally, small-money political donating is a way for ordinary people to express support for, empower, and hold accountable political actors who—while they might not willingly adopt the role of “surrogate representative”—nonetheless wield significant power over, or make decisions that are highly consequential for, people they do not formally represent (Mansbridge Reference Mansbridge2003).
As noted earlier, small-money political donating isn’t entirely accessible: people with no money can’t make even small donations. Small-money political donating also doesn’t instantiate political equality, because wealthy people can make many more small donations than poor people.Footnote 24 This latter issue is mitigated somewhat by the fact that as long as donors rather than donations are counted, multiple donations to the same recipient don’t help—and can even undermine—the recipient’s percieved democratic legitimacy. More generally, the idea that small-money political donations are only successful if they overcome all economically based forms of exclusion is a hangover from a narrow focus on size and the problem of big money in politics. If we focus instead on medium, we can consider the degree to which, because they are monetary, small-money political donations can compensate for (what are, at least in the first instance) non-monetary forms of exclusion.
How money’s divisibility helps make small-money political donating accessible. One democratic benefit of money’s divisibility is that it makes small-money political donating potentially expressive, as in the $20.20 donations to the crowdfunding campaign for Collins’ challenger. Here I want to elucidate another democratic strength of money’s divisibility: it helps make small-money political donating a relatively accessible form of small-scale political action, compared to non-monetary forms. Because the divisibility of money relates to donation size, this point might at first look like the standard “vertical” argument for small-money political donating made by critics of big money in politics. But my argument here isn’t about the difference between big and small monetary donations. Rather, it is that because money is divisible, the minimum amount of money necessary to engage in meaningful political action by donating is often more accessible than the minimum amount of time necessary to engage in meaningful non-monetary forms of political action, such as speaking at a meeting or even voting.
For the harried parent without childcare or the young adult juggling school and two jobs, donating $10 or $20 on their phone via ActBlue or WinRed can be easier than spending two hours canvassing (cf. Schlozman, Brady, and Verba Reference Schlozman, Brady and Verba2018, 25-6).Footnote 25 While direct comparisons are difficult, money is typically more divisible than many other common forms of small-scale political action, such as voting, protesting, and attending public meetings. While time itself is even more divisible than money, the minimum amount of time needed to attend a protest or public meeting, or vote, is often larger and less flexible than the (roughly) corresponding amount of money that can be donated to those same causes. For example, while door-to-door canvassing usually requires at least two hours, the smallest allowable donation to the campaign for Collins’ challenger was, as noted earlier, $1.00.
The example of the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee helps illustrate the democratic potential of money’s divisibility (and, though to a lesser extent, its mobility, fungibility and commensurability). Like other similar committees in Northern U.S. cities in the decades leading up to the Civil War, the Philadelphia Committee provided transportation, lodging, food, legal counsel, and other assistance to men, women, and children fleeing slavery (Boromé Reference Boromé1968; Bearse Reference Bearse1880; Olsavky Reference Olsavsky2018; Stewart Reference Stewart2014). After the Fugitive Slave Act was passed in 1850, Vigilant Committees sought to “resist, defy, baffle, and nullify the law” by physically confronting, blocking, and shaming slave catchers, and posting bail for local residents who helped formerly enslaved people avoid recapture (Bearse Reference Bearse1880). Because they often reimbursed their members for expenses incurred in assisting people who escaped from slavery, Vigilant Committees emphasized fundraising and responsible fiscal oversight. Members of the Philadelphia Committee paid $.25 to join and $.75 in yearly dues; they organized fundraisers (in conjunction with their women’s auxiliary) and appointed a treasurer and finance committee to solicit donations from non-members (Boromé Reference Boromé1968, 323-5).
One entry in the Philadelphia Committee’s ledger lists fifty-five donations received between September 11, 1839, and January 13, 1840, the largest of which was $5.00 (Boromé Reference Boromé1968, 341). In addition to donations from numerous named individuals, it also includes several donations ranging from $.50 to $3.00 labelled “Cash from a friend,” a $4.00 donation labelled “Cash from a young woman,” a donation of $5.00 from (curiously) “one not anti-slavery,” and several donations simply labelled “Cash.” The smallest donation on the list is 12½ cents (equivalent to about $3.40 today), listed as “Cash.” Given what we know about the Vigilant Committees, it is entirely possible that 12½ cents was all this donor could afford, and that due to their race, age, gender, or citizenship status, donating 12½ cents to the Philadelphia Vigilant Committee was the only tactic available to them to fight slavery.
Of course, a small-money political donation made 180 years ago does not offer direct evidence about how the monetariness of small-money political donating functions in the context of U.S. politics today. However, it directs attention to a tradition of underground activist networks and counter-publics, funded partially or entirely by small-money political donations, that runs from the Vigilant Committees of the mid-1800s through the 1960s-era Abortion Counseling Service of Women’s Liberation (also known as Jane) (Leach Reference Leach2020) to the Minnesota Freedom Fund (which fights unjust incarceration) today. We should not romanticize small-money political donating, any more than we should romanticize street protests, voting, or other forms of political action. But nor should we discount the dignity and political efficacy of a 12½ cent donation to the Philadelphia Vigilant Committee and other similar instances of small-money political donating, merely because they are monetary.
How Monetariness Makes Small-Money Political Donating Non-Intrusive
As the foregoing discussion of accessibility demonstrates, one way that small-money political donating can be democratic is by enabling people who are marginalized or excluded from other forms of political action, but who should have a say on democratic grounds, to exercise voice or influence. However, in contexts where donors should not have a say on democratic grounds,Footnote 26 small-money political donating can be democratic for a roughly opposite reason: because it enables donors to empower recipients while minimizing donors’ own influence.
In other words, small-money political donating can be democratic because it can be—not entirely but relatively—non-intrusive. Critics of big money in politics emphasize that, because they are offering lots of money, big donors often have a direct, inside line to recipients, who in turn have an incentive to follow big donors’ dictates (Schlozman, Brady, and Verba Reference Schlozman, Brady and Verba2018, 27, 46; Kalla and Broockman Reference Kalla and Broockman2015). In contrast, small-money political donations are non-intrusive because they are small. But in addition to this, as I will now argue, small-money political donations are non-intrusive in another way, not (only) because they are small, but also because they are monetary.Footnote 27 More specifically, while small-money political donations avoid the intrusive influence of big-money political donations because they are small, they also avoid the meddlesome, domineering interference that sometimes plagues in-person forms of political action (e.g., volunteering, partnerships) because they are monetary. To be clear, small donors still exercise power, individually and collectively, by deciding where, when, how, and how much to donate. But once their donation is made, they can support recipients without calling the shots.
This is possible primarily because of money’s commensurability—the fact that it can be used to buy many different things—and secondarily because of money’s mobility, which enables action at a distance.Footnote 28 For example, as noted earlier, some anti-racist activists and organizers argue that donating money is an especially apt way for white people to fight white supremacy because it is more concretely empowering than, e.g., a Facebook repost, but less overbearing than leading chants at a rally or directing strategy for a Black-led anti-racist organization (Phillips Reference Phillips2020; Hajela and Italie Reference Hajela and Italie2020; Women of Color for Progress n.d.). In other words, small-money political donating is roughly analogous to what Jane Mansbridge calls the “selection model” of representation: donors exert power primarily via their initial decision about whether, when, how, to whom (etc.) to donate; the commensurability of money enables them to cede power at the moment the donation is made.Footnote 29 Unlike the “naked Athena” protester in Portland, Oregon, who practiced yoga, naked, between protesters and the police during the George Floyd demonstrations, small-money political donors can remain on the right side of “the line … . between amplifying a voice and becoming the voice, between ardent allyship and white saviorship” (Jackson Reference Jackson2020).Footnote 30
In sum, when people who should have a say on democratic grounds are instead excluded from non-monetary forms of political action, the democratic value of small-money political donating lies primarily in its accessibility. More specifically, money’s mobility and divisibility make small-money political donating potentially accessible by enabling donors to overcome geographic, social, and legal distance. Conversely, when people who should not have a say on democratic grounds seek to empower those who should, the democratic value of small-money political donating arises primarily from non-intrusiveness. More specifically, money’s commensurability and (secondarily) mobility enables donors to donate and then get out of the way.
How Monetariness Makes Small-Money Political Donating Collective
While collective action is not always democratic, in modern mass democracies organized groups regularly engage in collective action to get issues on the agenda, advocate for policies, and resist excessive consolidations of political power. A third objection to big-money political donating—in addition to it being inaccessible and intrusive—is that it is atomistic: rather than having to deliberate, argue, organize, and compromise collectively with others, big-money political donors can push their agendas independently, or in partnership with a few other wealthy donors.
Proponents of small-money political donating argue that small donors avoid this objection because, due to the fact that their donations are small, they can’t accomplish anything unless many other small donors share their aims (MacKenzie Reference MacKenzie2020). Critics of small-money political donating counter that, while this may be true, compared to non-monetary forms of small-scale political action such as protesting, small-money political donating is also atomistic because it is monetary: individuals donate alone, from their phones or computers. More generally, as a review article on anthropological approaches to money puts it, “money and the violence of its abstractions erode the sociability subtending human existence, and the very idea of society itself. Money’s baaaaaaaaaad” (Maurer Reference Maurer2006; see also Zelizer Reference Zelizer2005, 25-6).
In contrast to this view, I want to suggest that, because small-money political donations are monetary, and money is fungible, small-money political donating can be a type of jointly efficacious action. Even if it is not collective in the full sense of that term—even if it does not involve a group of people working closely together over time to achieve a shared political goal—it is also not entirely atomistic, or even merely aggregative. More specifically, not only do donors to a given cause or candidate share the same goal (roughly speaking), but also because money is fungible, donations to the same “pot” flow together. Like drops of water in a bucket, once combined, they cannot be extricated. If Sara Gideon (Susan Collins’ eventual challenger in the Maine Senate race) spends $5,000 of the money from the crowdfunding campaign on television advertisements, it is impossible to say, even in principle, which donors funded those advertisements; the most we can say is that donors funded them, together.
Because money is fungible, small-money political donating is more collective than some non-monetary forms of small-scale political action, such as individually writing a letter to one’s representative. Also because money is fungible, small-money political donating is differently collective than some non-monetary forms of political action. For example, just as it’s impossible to say which small donors paid for a particular campaign expense, it’s also impossible to say which voters caused a candidate to win. While both of these processes can be read as weakly collective forms of political action, the fact that money is both fungible and commensurable means that, compared to voters, donors can collectively “do” a wider range of things, or make possible a wider range of outcomes, than voters can. In particular, for ordinary people without specialized training, sometimes the best (or even only) way to support scientific, artistic, and legal forms of political action, especially on emergent issues, is to send money. Small-money political donations can be agglomerated together and translated directly into support for testing water quality in Flint, projecting artwork on Confederate monuments, and (for better or worse) challenging election results in court (Heard Reference Heard1960; Overton Reference Overton2012; cf. Smith Reference Smith1997, 90-91).
Of course, at a subjective, psychological level, small-money political donating often doesn’t feel collective (cf. Overton Reference Overton2012, who disagrees). But donors’ perceptions of the collective dimensions of donating are not decisive, and can be influenced by aspects of the act of donating itself. These aspects include whether or not they made their donation in response to a personal request (which is how many donations are made; Overton Reference Overton2012 and Culberson, McDonald, and Robbins Reference Culberson, McDonald and Robbins2019), whether their donation is framed as a “membership,” and whether recipients seek to cultivate donors’ sense of connection to each other. Also important are portrayals of small-money political donating by journalists and other third parties: just as aerial photographs help shape how participants understand the collective dimension of in-person forms of political action such as protesting, news reports (e.g., about the outpouring of donations to progressive causes in the hours after Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s death) shape how participants understand the collective dimensions of donating (Slodysko Reference Slodysko2020).
Limitations of Small-Money Political Donating
I have argued that small-money political donating has more democratic potential than is often recognized, because this potential derives not only from its smallness, but also from its monetariness. I have also emphasized the importance of a horizontal perspective, comparing small-money political donating not only to big-money political donating, but also to non-monetary forms of small-scale political action. This horizontal perspective is helpful for analyzing not only the strengths of small-money political donating, but also its limitations. Some of these limitations derive from its monetariness; some don’t. Some undermine its democratic potential; some are detrimental in other ways. I turn next to a brief discussion of these limitations. Rather than offer a comprehensive overview, my aim is to show that, while some of these limitations are significant, they don’t give us reason to reject small-money political donating out of hand.
First, though, I want to briefly address an objection to small-money political donating that is often mentioned, but seems to lack any empirical basis, at least in the contemporary United States. This is the claim, articulated by civic republicans and participatory democrats, that small-money political donating displaces more democratically educative forms of in-person political action (Rousseau Reference Rousseau1997, 113, see also Schlozman, Brady, and Verba Reference Schlozman, Brady and Verba2018, 25). While this would be a significant downside of small-money political donating if it occurred, research suggests that in the contemporary United States, “giving and doing are reciprocal activities: volunteering stimulates giving, while giving small amounts seems to heighten non-financial forms of participation by people who feel more invested in the process” (Corrado et al. Reference Corrado, Malbin, Mann and Ornstein2010; Overton Reference Overton2012).
Turning now to objections to small-money political donating that have a stronger empirical basis, I begin with the worry that small-money political donating is economizing: that it functions according to a neoliberal, economistic logic, rather than a political one (Brown Reference Brown2015). Some small-money political donating is economizing, as the quotation about “political retail therapy” cited earlier suggests. Some, however, is not. For example, individuals who made $20.20 donations to support Collins’ future challenger were not thereby further interpolating themselves as market subjects; they were using money creatively, to act politically. The same goes for donors to Vigilant Committees who sought to “resist, defy, and baffle” a political order that legalized and supported markets for human beings. Other examples of non-economizing small-money political donating include donations to the satiric fundraising website for “victims” of the (non-existent) “Bowling Green Massacre” discussed by Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway (the donations were redirected to the ACLU; Contorno Reference Contorno and Jacobson2017), and the 82,000 donations to Planned Parenthood made in honor of the avidly anti-abortion Mike Pence in the five weeks after he was elected vice president in 2016 (Ryan Reference Ryan2016). These sly, subversive, funny, and sometimes insurgent acts are not examples of a neoliberal, economizing logic creeping into the democratic political domain. To the contrary, they represent an expansion of the political: these donors used economic transactions to join with others to send political messages, shame political actors, and support political organizations. The constitutive features of money—its commensurability, mobility, fungibility, and divisibility—helped make these forms of political action possible. While more research is needed into what, exactly, distinguishes economizing from non-economizing forms of small-money political donating (and on whether the instrumental, maximizing logic of homo economicus is always out of place in democratic politics), these examples demonstrate that some small-money political donating is not economizing.
While Brown’s target is economization rather than monetization, some social theorists are critical of money itself, in particular the way that its commensurability flattens specificity and difference, yielding instead an “abstract universality” in which everything can be commensurated with everything else (Walzer Reference Walzer1983, 96-7; see also Arendt Reference Arendt1958, 57, Maurer Reference Maurer2006). Extended to small-money political donating, this allegation would suggest not that it is caught up in a logic of neoliberalism, but rather that it is flat, bland, and boring. While it’s not clear how much purchase this allegation has as a specifically political criticism, the foregoing examples also demonstrate that the commensurability of money does not render small-money political donating drably uniform or tedious. To the contrary, money’s commensurability is part of what makes small-money political donating potentially creative and funny.
While social and critical theorists worry about the depoliticizing effects of money, some political scientists highlight the opposite concern: not too little politicization, but rather too much—in particular, too much political polarization. The idea here is that because small-money donors’ donations are too small to buy personal access to a candidate, they tend to be more “purposive” in their donating, supporting their “team,” or “particular issue agendas” (Ansolabehere, de Figueiredo, and Snyder Reference Ansolabehere, de Figueiredo and Snyder2003; Culberson, McDonald, and Robbins Reference Culberson, McDonald and Robbins2019).Footnote 31 While big donors have reason to favor mainstream candidates who are more likely to win (and who support the status quo that enabled them to accumulate money), small donors have reason to favor more extreme candidates with bold ideas who promise to “shake things up.” As a result—this thinking goes—small-money political donating exacerbates polarization.
Scholars disagree about whether small-money political donating is polarizing and (if it is polarizing) what exactly this polarization consists of, and why it occurs (Culberson, McDonald, and Robbins Reference Culberson, McDonald and Robbins2019; Keena and Knight-Finley Reference Keena and Knight-Finley2019, Harden and Kirkland Reference Harden and Kirkland2016). It is also not clear whether small-money political donating is more polarizing than non-monetary forms of political action such as protesting, whether small-money political donating outside of electoral politics contributes to polarization, and whether the anti-democratic effects of big-money donations are normatively worse than the polarizing effects of small money donations. While these and other questions require additional research, polarization could well be a significant downside of small-money political donating.
While political polarization is troubling, it is not, at least in any direct way, undemocratic. In contrast, another aspect of small-money political donating—that small donors tend to be more privileged than the people who (on democratic grounds) should have a say—is undemocratic. As I noted earlier, small-money political donating can be too accessible to people who, on democratic grounds, should not have a say. For example, in 2012 the U.S.-based NGO Invisible Children released a video, Kony 2012, about the Ugandan war criminal Joseph Kony. The video raised $30 million in mostly small donations from people in the United States to help find and prosecute Kony. Not only was the video factually inaccurate and condescending toward Africans; it also promoted the broader redirection of resources toward a goal that many ordinary Ugandans did not view as a priority (Vida, McCarthy, and Curtis Reference Vidal, McCarthy and Curtis2012).
More generally, small-money political donating in the United States is currently unrepresentative in the sense that donors to candidates, parties, and organizations that support candidates skew wealthier, older, and have more formal education than non-donors (Hughes Reference Hughes2017; Overton Reference Overton2012). To make matters worse, small-money political donors to these causes might be even less representative than participants in non-monetary forms of small-scale political action, such as voting (Schlozman, Brady, and Verba Reference Schlozman, Brady and Verba2018, 26). That said, as I have emphasized, donations to candidates for elected office do not exhaust the limits of small-money political donating. There is some evidence that donors to social movements and civic organizations, especially those working on racial justice, police reform, and climate change are less skewed in these respects than donors to candidates for elected office (Goldmacher Reference Goldmacher2020; Mier Reference Mier2020). More research is also needed on whether extremely small donations—those that express support and build democratic legitimacy, even if they don’t transfer significant purchasing power—are less skewed than slightly larger (but still small) donations.Footnote 32
Moreover, in some contexts there are justice-based reasons to think that donations should come from donors who skew more privileged. As we have seen, small-money political donating can be a form of voice or influence, but it can also be a form of (relatively) non-intrusive support. One could argue, for example, that privileged white people should shoulder the cost of protecting and expanding voting rights for African-Americans in Georgia (even if they should not be the ones deciding how this ought to be done). While there are complicated questions here about ownership, self-determination, and the extent to which truly non-intrusive donating is possible, it is crucial to acknowledge the two sides of donating: that it is both a form of voice and influence, as well as a mode of empowering others.
That said, most instances of unrepresentative small-money political donating do not take the form of privileged people non-intrusively aiding or compensating the less privileged. Rather, the fact that small-money political donors tend to be more privileged than non-donors (even if their preferences align more with those of non-donors than the preferences of big donors align with those of non-donors) is a significant drawback on democratic grounds, and suggests that the democratic potential of small-money political donating—like the democratic potential of voting and other forms of small-scale political action—is not yet fully realized. More research is needed regarding whether the best strategies for achieving this potential involve reducing small-money political donating or expanding it.
In sum, like non-monetary forms of small-scale political action, small-money political donating has limitations. But these limitations don’t justify dismissing it or ignoring its democratic potential—whether that potential arises from its smallness, its monetariness, or both.
Implications
If monetariness enhances the democratic potential of small-money political donating, does it do the same for other money-centered and money-adjacent political activities, such as big-money political donating and voucher programs?
With regard to big-money political donating, the answer is no. This is because for the most part, the features of money discussed earlier function differently in the context of small donations than they do in the context of big ones. While money’s mobility helps make small-money political donating accessible to people who are excluded from non-monetary forms of political action, it enables big-money donors to exercise their already-disproportionate influence even further afield. While money’s divisibility helps make small-money political donating more accessible and expressive, divisibility is largely irrelevant to big-money political donors, both because they donate large amounts and because they usually don’t seek to express themselves by donating a precise amount. Finally, while money’s fungibility enables both small- and big-money political donors to engage in collective action, big donors have less incentive to do so. Moreover, due to their disproportionate influence big donors’ involvement in such collective efforts is not democratic.
The situation with money’s commensurability is more complicated. One benefit of money’s commensurability in the context of small donations—that it enables donors to be non-intrusive—also applies to some degree in the context of big-money political donations. For example, billionaire philanthropist MacKenzie Scott has been giving donations with no conditions, with the aim of “amplifying gifts by yielding control”—something that is possible, in large part, because of money’s commensurability (Scott Reference Scott2021). But to avoid creating a situation where potential recipients seek to cater to her preferences, those donations must also be “unsolicited and unexpected” (Scott Reference Scott2020). Thus, commensurability isn’t enough to make larger donations non-intrusive.
Another benefit of money’s commensurability in the context of small donations—that it enables donors to support a wide range of causes and initiatives—also applies in the context of big donations. For example, in his qualified defense of philanthropic foundations, Reich emphasizes that they can discover novel ways of addressing large-scale social problems (Reich Reference Reich2018, ch. 4). This is possible not only because foundations have a lot of money, but also because money is commensurable. However, even if Reich is correct about this and other democratic strengths of foundations, these strengths do not necessarily counterbalance other serious objections to big money in politics based in concerns about political inequality, corruption, and the detrimental epistemic effects of giving only a few people political voice (Pevnick Reference Pevnick2016; MacKenzie Reference MacKenzie2020; McGoey Reference McGoey2015).
Do the foregoing arguments about the democratic potential—and limits—of small-money political donating extend to voucher programs? Voucher programs have been proposed as mechanisms to fund election campaigns, as in Seattle’s Democracy Voucher Program (DVP, discussed further later) and 501(c)3-registered civil society organizations, as in Reich’s argument for a “civil society stakeholding grant” (Reich Reference Reich2018, 133; see also Pevnick Reference Pevnick2013). While the specific goals of voucher programs vary, one common aim is to reduce political inequality and enhance participation by overcoming economic hurdles to participation. A salient question, then, is whether voucher programs serve this function (and other democratic aims) better than approaches that utilize money itself, such as cash transfers (I here leave aside other alternatives, such as full public funding of election campaigns). While I can’t fully address this question here, I want to briefly indicate how the foregoing analysis helps address it, by providing benchmarks to which voucher programs can be compared.
As an example, consider the city of Seattle’s DVP, which enables residents of Seattle who are 18 and over—not only citizens, but also U.S. nationals and lawful permanent residents—to donate four $25 vouchers to candidates for the Seattle City council and a few other city offices.Footnote 33 The program has been utilized in two elections thus far (2017 and 2019). In both elections the rate of voucher use was low, but it did increase significantly, from 4% in 2017 to 8% in 2019. Participation was also skewed, with older, whiter, and wealthier residents using the vouchers at higher rates. However, the DVP might have contributed to higher voter turnout by facilitating more competitive elections (Ramsey et al. Reference Ramsey, Anderson, Tesch and Major2020).
Like money, the DVP vouchers could be used from home, didn’t require public-speaking skills, and were accessible to some non-citizens. However, because they excluded people under 18 and non-residents of Seattle (who were nonetheless affected by decisions made by the Seattle government), and because using the vouchers required adding one’s name to a special government database (which many people with unsettled immigration status did not want to do), they were less accessible than donating conventional money (Ramsey et al. Reference Ramsey, Anderson, Tesch and Major2020; Heerwig and McCabe Reference Heerwig and McCabe2019).
The DVP replicated money’s fungibility, enabling Seattle residents to act collectively to support their preferred candidates. However, it did not replicate money’s divisibility: four $25 vouchers provide less flexibility than ten $10 vouchers, and less potential for creative self-expression than $100 of conventional money. Because it limited donations to candidates for only a few positions, rather than all city offices—and, crucially, civil society organizations—the DVP also did not replicate money’s commensurability (cf. Pevnick Reference Pevnick2013). While the exclusion of civil-society organizations meant that vouchers didn’t enable people with views outside the mainstream or with specific priorities to express and promote their preferences, the fact that the vouchers were just that—vouchers, rather than regular money—gave them a different status, and might have encouraged different sorts of considerations in how they should be spent, than regular money (Zelizer Reference Zelizer2005). In sum, in evaluating the democratic potential of vouchers, it is useful to ask to what degree vouchers replicate money’s mobility, divisibility, fungibility, and commensurability, and consider the resulting implications for accessibility, non-intrusiveness, and collective action.
Conclusion
While critics of big money in politics celebrate small-money political donations because they are small, and proponents of small-scale political action often denigrate or ignore them because they are monetary, I have argued that the monetariness of small-money political donations is an important source of their distinctive democratic potential. In particular, the mobility, divisibility, commensurability, and fungibility of money help to make small-money political donating potentially accessible, non-intrusive, and collective.
My fundamental aim in making this argument is to encourage a different way of thinking about small-money political donating. Rather than celebrate it or eye it with suspicion, we should treat small-money political donating as one more form of potentially democratic small-scale political action—one that has distinctive strengths and weaknesses, can be deployed to do many different things (not just fight big money in politics), and can complement non-monetary forms of small-scale political action (which have their own strengths and weaknesses). This “horizontal” perspective on small-money political donating is especially salient for people on the Left, who tend to be more worried about money’s anti-democratic effects, and who are therefore more prone to dismissing political activities that are money related.
The foregoing argument also opens up several additional lines of inquiry for normative, critical, and empirical scholarship. One such line of inquiry is about the political ethics of small-money political donating, for donors and recipients. What are donors’ duties of due diligence in selecting and monitoring recipients? How, if at all, do donors’ responsibilities change based on their relationship to the issue in question: when ought they seek to exercise, and when minimize, their voice and influence? If the latter, should they conceive of themselves as “surrogate accountability-holders” for those most directly affected (Rubenstein Reference Rubenstein2007)? Does being an ethical donor require not sending money willy-nilly to many disparate causes, but instead embarking on more sustained relationships with a smaller number of recipients?
Likewise, what are the ethical responsibilities of recipients of small-money political donations? Beyond obvious questions about unscrupulous or misleading fundraising techniques, we might also consider how recipients of small-money political donations could make the practice of small-money political donating more consistent with relevant democratic norms, for example, by (perhaps counterintuitively) soliciting small donations from those most affected by the issue at hand, reducing the power of more privileged small donors (not just individually but collectively), and making the collective aspects of donating more vivid to donors?
A second line of inquiry involves the role of larger-scale organizations and institutions in shaping small-money political donating. In particular, what should be the role of media and watchdog organizations in supporting ethical action by donors and recipients? How might political parties and fundraising platforms such as ActBlue and WinRed address issues of non-representativeness and political polarization? What donation statistics should be viewed as relevant to recipients’ claims of democratic legitimacy, e.g., number of donations, average donation size, average amount donated per donor over an election cycle?
Finally, if small-money political donating is currently skewed toward the more privileged, what laws and institutional reforms could make it more representative? Can voucher programs be designed to retain the strengths and avoid the limitations of small-money political donating? If not (and even if so) how might the democratic potential of small-money political donating strengthen democratic (as opposed to welfare-based) arguments for a universal basic income?
Critics of big money in politics are right to reject big-money political donations because they are big, but wrong to embrace small-money political donations only because they are small. It is not just smallness, but also monetariness—and in particular money’s mobility, divisibility, fungibility, and commensurability—that give small-money political donating its distinctive democratic potential, enabling, for example, $20.20 contributions to the crowdfunding campaign for Collins’ challenger and 12½ cent donations to the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee. Money is the coin of the economic realm, but it can also be a currency of democratic politics.
Acknowledgement
For extremely helpful comments on previous versions of this paper, the author thanks Libby Anker, Lawrie Balfour, Ira Bashkow, Suzanne Dovi, Lisa Ellis, Clarissa Hayward, Murad Idris, Justin Kirkland, Jennifer Petersen, Allison Pugh, Denise Walsh, participants at the 2018 Association for Political Theory conference, and four anonymous reviewers for this journal. She also thanks Hayley Elszasz for excellent comments and research assistance.
