Procedural Reform Movements

Concept that helps understand the logic of projects like the Creative Commons

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"Political reporter Thomas Edsall, in his 1984 book The New Politics of Inequality, draws a distinction between two types of reformers in the center-left coalition. The vast majority of interest groups in Washington, from the Sierra Club to the AFL-CIO to Planned Parenthood, are pursuing what Edsall calls "substantive reform"--attempting to push legislation and enact policies that will provide public goods, protect citizens from harm and redistribute benefits, rights and privileges away from the powerful and toward middle-class citizens and disenfranchised minorities. Then there's a small cluster of about a dozen groups--Public Campaign, the Center for Responsive Politics and the Sunlight Foundation--that focus on procedural reform. Rather than trying to win the game, they're trying to change the rules: pushing for broader enfranchisement, more transparency and, crucially, reforms that will reduce the influence of big money on politics.

The procedural reformers, many of whom were in the audience at Lessig's Press Club talk, have some significant victories they can point to over the past several decades, most notably the public financing system set up for presidential elections after Watergate and the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (aka McCain-Feingold), which banned soft money. Recently, they've had success at the state level, pushing through clean elections laws in Maine and Arizona. But each reform to limit big money in politics is followed by innovations that only increase its role, leading many to conclude that attempting to change the rules is a pointless quest; energy would be better spent on trying to win within the regime. "If you think it's hard trying to get oil companies to pay attention to global warming," Dan Becker, a longtime environmental activist told me, "just try working on getting money out of politics." (http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080616/hayes/print)

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See also: Recursive Public