Truthful Representation
First Amendment principles, campaign finance, and capital markets
In capital markets, the quality and timing of information are central to the case for disclosure and anti-fraud rules. In Truthful Representation, I ask what that reasoning can contribute to campaign finance: how could the rules around corporate political spending better inform voters while preserving political expression?
My argument starts with representation. Protecting political speech matters partly because citizens need to hear, assess, and respond to competing arguments. That raises a question about the information reaching them: can concentrated spending change whose preferences an election represents, even when everyone retains the formal right to speak?
Information, influence, and representation
I bring First Amendment theory into conversation with information economics and develop a stylized model of a winner-take-all election. Under the model’s assumptions, a dominant spender can influence undecided voters through control of information channels, shifting the outcome without a change in voters’ underlying preferences.
The distinction between persuasive arguments and dominance over the channels carrying them is central to the paper. It gives a reason to examine the timing, sources, and visibility of political spending alongside the protection of speech itself.
From that framework, I develop three proposals: real-time, machine-readable disclosure of corporate election spending; shareholder authorization for large political expenditures; and an anti-fraud rule for election communications modeled on securities regulation. The aim is to make political influence easier to scrutinize and corporate spending more accountable to the people whose resources fund it.
This is a theoretical and normative argument. The model illustrates a mechanism rather than estimating the effects of actual campaign spending, and the proposals are arguments for institutional change rather than settled legal conclusions.
I explore the related disclosure problem in Campaign Finance Is Securities Fraud Without the Consequences, published in Limiting Factors on April 27, 2026.