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Cover -- Endorsements -- Half Title -- Series Page -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- List of Tables -- List of Figures -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction: Public Policing's Greed and Dark Money: Private Sponsorship and Funding of Police in North America -- 1. Theorizing the Flow of Dark Money in Policing: From Gifts to the Greedy Institution -- 2. Mapping the Police Funding Terrain: Donors, Sponsors, Foundations, Paid Detail, Forfeiture, and Beyond -- 3. Glossing Over the Greedy Institution: Views from Inside Police Foundations -- 4. Corporate-Police Partnerships and the Extension of Greed -- 5. Shadow Figures: Paid Detail Policing as Private Funding and the New Brokers -- 6. Framing Dark Money as Community Benefit -- 7. Controversies and Holes in Private Police Funding Policy -- Conclusion: The Future of Private Sponsorship and Funding of Police: Greed to Generosity, Dark Money to Defunding, and Beyond -- References -- Index.

1. Introduction: Deceiving Democracy -- 2. The Campaign of 2016 -- 3. Boardroom Progressives or Rich People's Movement? -- 4. Secret Funders: Oligarchs United -- 5. Political Fronts -- 6. Upstream Money and Downstream Money: The Hidden Flow of Funds -- 7. Democrats for Education Reform and the Inside Job -- 8. Racial Perceptions, Racial Realities -- 9. After 2016: Money Never Sleeps -- 10. Conclusion: Defeating Dark Money in School Privatization—And Everywhere Else.

Judges, even when popularly elected, are not representatives; they are not agents for their voters, nor should they take voter preferences into account in adjudicating cases. However, popularly elected judges are representatives for some election law purposes. Unlike other elected officials, judges are not politicians. But judges are policy-makers. Judicial elections are subject to the same constitutional doctrines that govern voting on legislators, executives, and ballot propositions. Except when they are not. The same First Amendment doctrine that protects campaign speech in legislative, executive, and ballot proposition elections applies to campaign speech in judicial elections – but not in quite the same way. Independent committees have the same right to spend in judicial elections as they do in other elections. But significant independent spending can result in the imposition of a constitutional restriction on the behavior of an elected judge who benefited from that spending. This restriction is without parallel for elected legislators or executives who benefit from similar independent spending.

This dissertation, broadly, focuses on how the ability to make political donations anonymously changed American politics. Culminating the 2010 Citizens United v. FEC decision, the rise of nonprofit corporations as a conduit for campaign money means that a large portion of spending in American elections cannot be connected to any individual donors creating a system akin to the Australian ballot for money in politics. I explore how this change affected three facets of American politics; how donors behave when they can give anonymously, how being able to shield ones donors affects the type of candidates an interest group supports and finally how the legal green-light for nonprofits to spend in elections changed which nonprofit organizations became financially involved with each other.First, I developed a complete accounting of grants made between nonprofit organizations built from over 2 million digitized IRS forms made public in the summer of 2016 as the result of a lawsuit. My dissertation is not only the first project that examines these filings at scale, but also the first time this full network has been mapped. Using a network science algorithm that partitions the full graph into meaningful communities, I develop a theory of what I term dark parties or groups of nonprofits linked financially that make independent expenditures in Congressional elections. Next, I show that while dark money organizations form networks similar to those of traditional political parties, the types of candidates they prefer are vastly different. In a chapter of my dissertation, I show that these organizations prefer candidates farther from the ideological center and are especially active during the primary elections that traditional parties tend to eschew.Using a mixed-methods approach, I show that being able to give anonymously has important consequences not just for interest group behavior, but for donor behavior as well. I examine a list of donors that I uncovered from court filings to a nationally active dark money organization that spenton two ballot initiatives in California during the 2012 election. This list is the only publicly available list of dark money donors in circulation today and the first time such a list is studied by an academic researcher. I show that the donors to this organization, which supported two conservative positions, were much more liberal in their non-anonymous political giving than donors who gave transparently. This finding shows that the ability to obscure ones identity lets a donor behave differently than they would when their donations are subject to public scrutiny.Finally, while ample literature on the effects of disclosure exists, examinations into the motivations of why donors choose anonymity in their political giving remains unstudied. I present two survey experiments that seek to answer this question. First, I present survey results from the 2018 Cooperative Congressional Election Study that show that past giving to candidates from the opposite party that one normally supports correlates with an increased willingness to pay a premium to keep one's political giving secret. Next, turning to another survey experiment, I find that potential voters are more likely to react negatively to an actual argument by opponents of a ballot measure when they know the names of the actual donors to a dark money group that opposed it. Combined, these results indicate both a social pressure rationale for obscuring one's political giving and a strategic goal of distancing an electoral campaign from controversial donors.Taken as a whole, this research answers a broader question related to the balance of power between political parties and interest groups. Political parties perform a myriad of functions crucial to the maintenance of government that our democracy as presently conceived would be unthinkablewithout them. Despite their ubiquity, however, parties are notoriously hard to define. Parties existbeyond the formal structure of party officers and official state chapters, encompassing a myriadof outside actors whowhile not bearing the official stamp of the organizationare crucial to itsmission. The balance of power between these interest groupsbroadly definedand the formal partyorganizations are dictated by a myriad of factors–such as legal limitations, resource constraints anddiffering electoral goals.

"Police Funding, Dark Money, and the Greedy Institution is about a pervasive but little-studied phenomenon: private funding of public police which entails private entities sending resources to police through unconventional or hidden channels, sometimes for suspect reasons. The book argues police acquisition of this "dark money" befits the notion of a "greedy institution" that pursues resources beyond ample public funding and needs and seeks ever more loyal members beyond its traditional boundaries to reproduce itself. The book focuses on private police foundations, corporate sponsorships, and paid detail arrangements primarily in North America, how these funding networks operate and are framed for audiences, and the forms and volumes of capital they generate. Based on interviews with police representatives, sponsors, funders, and foundation representatives as well as records from over 100 hundred police departments, this book examines key issues in private funding of public police, including corporatization, accountability, corruption, and the rule of law. It documents and analyzes the troubling explosion of police foundations and sponsors and corporate paid detail brokers unknown to the public as a social and policy issue and a hidden response to the global police defunding movement. The book also considers potential policy responses and community safety alternatives in a more generous society. An accessible and compelling read, students and scholars in criminology, criminal justice, law, sociology, political science, anthropology, geography, as well as policymakers, will find this timely book revealing of a neglected, growing area of police practice spanning multiple themes and jurisdictions"--