Cite as: 558 U. S. ____ (2010) 55 Opinion of STEVENS, J. the restrictions on those expenditures were justified by a compelling state interest. See McConnell, 540 U. S., at 205; Austin, 494 U. S., at 658, 660. We acknowledged in Bellotti that numerous “interests of the highest impor­ tance” can justify campaign finance regulation. 435 U. S., at 788–789. But we found no evidence that these interests were served by the Massachusetts law. Id., at 789. We left open the possibility that our decision might have been different if there had been “record or legislative findings that corporate advocacy threatened imminently to under­ mine democratic processes, thereby denigrating rather than serving First Amendment interests.” Ibid. Austin and McConnell, then, sit perfectly well with Bellotti. Indeed, all six Members of the Austin majority had been on the Court at the time of Bellotti, and none so much as hinted in Austin that they saw any tension be­ tween the decisions. The difference between the cases is not that Austin and McConnell rejected First Amendment protection for corporations whereas Bellotti accepted it. The difference is that the statute at issue in Bellotti smacked of viewpoint discrimination, targeted one class of corporations, and provided no PAC option; and the State has a greater interest in regulating independent corporate expenditures on candidate elections than on referenda, because in a functioning democracy the public must have faith that its representatives owe their positions to the people, not to the corporations with the deepest pockets. * * * In sum, over the course of the past century Congress has demonstrated a recurrent need to regulate corporate participation in candidate elections to “ ‘[p]reserv[e] the integrity of the electoral process, preven[t] corruption, . . . sustai[n] the active, alert responsibility of the individual citizen,’ ” protect the expressive interests of shareholders, and “ ‘[p]reserv[e] . . . the individual citizen’s confidence in