Democratic decision-making in the United States does not solely affect U.S. citizens. Indeed, many such decisions impact people living in other countries, as well as noncitizens residing within the United States. Decisions on U.S. policies regarding climate change, immigration, trade, and military aid—to name a few—can have major implications for the lives of many non-Americans. Yet, in being noncitizens, such people effectively have zero representation within the democratic process that results in these decisions. This phenomenon illustrates what has become known as the problem of “democratic externalities.”
\nTheorists have proffered multiple democratic frameworks to resolve this problem—e.g., democratic cosmopolitanism, deliberative democracy, and epistemic aggregative democracy. Ultimately, though, none have managed to adequately mitigate the issue of underrepresentation that democratic externalities produce. Accordingly, this Article considers an alternative, albeit imperfect, route to addressing democratic externalities: transnational campaign finance. Specifically, this Article argues that by permitting foreign nationals to monetarily contribute to, or expend money in support of, political campaigns, a polity can better account for impacted noncitizens in its lawmaking and electoral decisions.
\nOver the past few decades, however, numerous U.S. states and countries have passed laws outright prohibiting transnational campaign finance. While there are certainly legitimate reasons to regulate the practice—e.g., corruption, distortion, misalignment, and national security—this Article contends that these measures have been too drastic in light of the democratic externalities problem. Thus, the latter portion of this Article provides guidance on how to best regulate transnational campaign finance in a way that mitigates its negative consequences without entirely impeding its pro-democratic value.
","language":null,"license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[],"section":"Article","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2gk1p576","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"John","middle_name":"J.","last_name":"Martin","name_suffix":"","institution":"","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2025-12-03T00:23:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/ucilr/article/59637/galley/45609/download/"}]}