Money influences politics everywhere. What sets the US apart is therefore not that money seeks to influence politics; it is rather the scale of the money involved that is exceptional. If differences in lobbying expenditures between the US and the EU are large (a factor of two, or three for corporate lobbying, as we saw in Chapter 9), differences in campaign contributions are staggering. Figure 10.5 shows total campaign contributions for federal elections in the US and total campaign expenditures for several European countries, normalized by GDP. The sample of European countries is primarily
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