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Small Money Donating as Democratic Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2021

Jennifer Rubenstein Open the ORCID record for Jennifer Rubenstein [Opens in a new window]
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Abstract

Since 2008, the number of people in the United States making small monetary donations to political causes, both within and beyond electoral politics, has skyrocketed. While critics of “big money” in politics laud these donations because they are small, proponents of small-scale democratic political action eye them suspiciously because they are monetary. Neither group interrogates whether the monetariness of these donations might be a source of their democratic potential. Building on Wendy Brown’s conceptual distinction between monetization and economization, I argue that small-money political donations are potentially democratic not only because they are small, but also because they are monetary. More specifically, the mobility, divisibility, commensurability, and fungibility of money help make small-money political donations potentially democratic, by making them potentially accessible, non-intrusive, and collective. Money is the coin of the economic realm, but it can also be a currency of democratic politics.

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Perspectives on Politics , Volume 20 , Issue 3 , September 2022 , pp. 965 - 982
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© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Political Science Association

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