would be less informed and the deliberative aspects of the democracy would be
compromised. Breyer therefore endorses what Frederick Schauer referred to as an
“egalitarian” vision of democracy.
Schauer said that the American court has been split
between supporting an “egalitarian” or “libertarian model of rights. The egalitarian
model is based on the assumption that “a state of affairs in which some voices may be
more influential than others, or have more power in fact to produce political outcomes
than others, is suspect.”
It therefore endorses state action to balance political power
and, if necessary, reallocate political resources. In contrast, the libertarian model
“stresses the liberty dimension of democracy more than the equality dimension” and is
“more skeptical of attempts to limit individual, organizational or corporate use of wealth
Thus, restraints on spending promote a more egalitarian, participatory vision of
democracy. Speech, in this regard, is a collective good that must be promoted and
fostered. To strike down all spending restrictions on the assumption that money is speech
would render political dialogue and conversation the province of the few loudest or best
financed voices in the polity. Insofar as this would result in a general diminishment of
the quantity and quality of political voices, Breyer reasons that there is a practical,
democracy-reinforcing reason to support such restrictions on individual speech rights
even though a promoter of the negative vision of the speech right might argue that such
spending limitations are exactly the sort of speech restraint the Constitution forbids.
So long as the curtailment of the individual speech right is balanced by a
corresponding enhancement of the collective caliber of political speech,
there is no reason to challenge the validity of the point at which the legislature chooses to
If campaign spending restrictions favor collective speech more than
9
Convention