390
Opinion of the Court
B
In defending its own statute, Missouri espouses those same interests of preventing corruption and the appearance of it that flows from munificent campaign contributions. Even without the authority of Buckley, there would be no serious question about the legitimacy of the interests claimed, which, after all, underlie bribery and antigratuity statutes. While neither law nor morals equate all political contributions, without more, with bribes, we spoke in Buckley of the perception of corruption "inherent in a regime of large individual financial contributions" to candidates for public office, id., at 27, as a source of concern "almost equal" to quid pro quo improbity, ibid. The public interest in countering that perception was, indeed, the entire answer to the overbreadth claim raised in the Buckley case. Id., at 30. This made perfect sense. Leave the perception of impropriety unanswered, and the cynical assumption that large donors call the tune could jeopardize the willingness of voters to take part in democratic governance. Democracy works "only if the people have faith in those who govern, and that faith is bound to be shattered when high officials and their appointees engage in activities which arouse suspicions of malfeasance and corruption." United States v. Mississippi Valley Generating Co., 364 U. S. 520, 562 (1961).
Although respondents neither challenge the legitimacy of these objectives nor call for any reconsideration of Buckley, they take the State to task, as the Court of Appeals did, for failing to justify the invocation of those interests with empirical evidence of actually corrupt practices or of a per-faced. We found no support for the proposition that an incumbent's advantages were leveraged into something significantly more powerful by contribution limitations applicable to all candidates, whether veterans or upstarts, 424 U. S., at 31-35. Since we do not relax Buckley's standard, no more need be said about respondents' argument, though we note that nothing in the record here gives respondents a stronger argument than the Buckley petitioners made.
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