The politics of party funding (original) (raw)
Related papers
Introduction: the party funding paradox and attempts at solutions
Handbook of Political Party Funding
A possible starting point for the consideration of party and campaign funding is Ambrose Bierce's tongue-in-cheek definition of 'elector' as 'one who enjoys the sacred privilege of voting for the man of another man's choice' (Bierce 1970: 20). Regardless of their origins and aims (the passing of policies that would realize their platform, support of specific individuals, or any combination of the two), parties, as Max Weber noted, 'live in the house of power' (Weber 2009: 1). They pool mass support and convert it into influence on the authoritative distribution of resources in society. However, the assumption that parties and their leaders are simply chosen by the constituents requires qualification. Where size and complexity entail the wide dispersal of the votes, most of the constituents do not cast ballots for themselves or for those with whom they are personally acquainted, but must choose among a limited number of alternatives set before them. Parties must therefore engage in candidate recruitment, long-and short-term agenda setting, the organization of public opinion, and the two-way conduct of communication between leaders and led. These activities are usually not restricted to campaign periods. If the will of the elected is not coordinated with that of their supporters in the aftermath of elections, and if mechanisms for the transmission of demands from the bottom up are insufficiently effective, elections are liable to yield only fleeting results. In consequence, political parties form complex and continuous organizations that are able to operate (though not necessarily at the same level of intensity) in both pre-election and post-election periods. This hinges on the ability to raise and spend funds, and these undertakings themselves could provide a sense of participation and ongoing interactions between supporters, the various levels of the party organization, and the elected representatives. Since party expenditures are (directly or indirectly) funded by the citizens, and parties reflect and affect the distribution of power in society, what voters want and what is available to them is germane to the fortunes of individual parties as well as the party system as a whole. The consequent reciprocal relations between socioeconomic and technological shifts and party funding help to explain the change in each. Developments that stretch over many decades rarely lend themselves to neat temporal divisions, all the more so where diverse political systems that are not subject to uniform type and tempo of change are concerned. Hence, it is prudent to draw a distinction between chronological time and the trajectory of change, and to focus attention on the latter. This allows us to discern two broad and partially overlapping phases in the development of party funding. The first was bequeathed in most cases from the period that preceded the emergence of modern parties (LaPalombara, Weiner 1966). The second phase crystallized, with few exceptions, under the impact of technological and economic transformations that altered the post-World War II social and political landscape, and is still dominant today.
French Politics, 2005
In both Britain and France, party funding was traditionally characterised by a laissez faire approach and a conspicuous lack of regulation. In France this was tantamount to a ‘legislative vacuum’. In the last two decades, however, both countries have sought to fundamentally reform their political finance regulation regimes. This prompted, in Britain, the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000, and in France a bout of ‘legislative incontinence’ – profoundly transforming the political finance regime between 1988 and 1995. This article seeks to explore and compare the impacts of the reforms in each country in a bid to explain the unintended consequences of the alternative paths taken and the effectiveness of the new party finance regime in each country. It finds that constitutional engineering through party finance reform is a singularly inexact science, largely due to the imperfect nature of information, the limited predictability of cause and effect, and the constraining influence of non-party actors, such as the Constitutional Council in France, and the Electoral Commission in Britain. Keywords: France; Britain; Party funding; constitutional engineering; unintended consequences.
Time series regression analysis is used to test the existence of a relationship between public expenditure priorities and changes in party programme emphases in the Fifth Republic. The analysis shows that the sensitivity of public expenditures to changes in party programme content is rarely affected by party control of the executive. Instead public expenditures in several spending areas are positively linked to the programme content of one and the same party irrespective of whether that party occupies the executive or not. In other spending areas, the programme of the opposition best predicts government expenditure priorities. These findings challenge the assumption in democratic theory that the party winning elections ought to enact policies that reflect the preferences of the electorate.
2015
Political parties as voluntary organizations of free citizens in democratic state feature their candidates for parliament and strive to gain the best results in elections. In order to participate in elections and accomplish the tasks they were founded for, political parties should have access to financial resources for paying expenditures related to their activities. This paper will show that political parties in Germany, contrary to the conflicts shown in public have build up mutual cooperation in developing generous system of party financing from public sources. Cooperation in political life and consensual decision making were developed in Germany as the outcome of the totalitarian past, and this conceptual background has been used by political parties in order to develop the system of public party financing. In this way party cartel was created, and parties took over the country and created party state.
Public funding to political parties: a forward-looking approach
Access to financial resources shapes politics and affects the nature of political representation. A non-regulated political market unavoidably creates disparity between political actors, with repercussions on the equality of opportunity in electoral competition and on democratic processes more broadly. Public funding to political parties has been introduced in European countries with this very justification, to limit the influence of big and powerful donors in the political process, prevent corruption, and avoid excessive disparity in political competition. However, by no means public funding provisions alone can meet these objectives. In order to curtail undue influence on the political process, comprehensive and coherent legal frameworks should be established. Only by doing so can public funding achieve its democratic goals of reducing the potential for corruption.
The Cost of Partitocracy: Party Funding in East Central Europe
The work’s goal is to contribute to the discussion on cartelisation in the party systems of East Central Europe. Its contribution to the research field is to be found in a thorough analysis of the budgets of political parties in the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia, to a smaller degree also of the budgets of political parties in Austria, Germany and Slovenia. In total thirty arguments found in the existing scholarly literature are discussed, with a focus on their relation to budgets and election strategies of political parties. These arguments are analysed with the help of basic tools of quantivative statistical analysis and the qualitative method of comparison of selected features of the analysed cases. The work’s analytical part is based on two new original datasets. The first one, where data on budgets of political parties are collected, uses publicly available sources found in both the off-line as well as the on-line world of today. The second one uses original data collected by the means of an electronic questionnaire send to representatives of political parties in the six researched countries. The work defines two new concepts that serve as the theoretical basis of the analysis: the rule drive and the strategy drive. The rule drive is the part of a party’s budget that is predominantly formed by legal regulations on political parties, their funding and activities. On the income side, the rule drive is mostly visible in the share of party budget comprised by state subsidies. On the expenditure side, the rule drive is most apparent in the legal limits of expenses parties may allocate to election campaigning. In addition, the rule drive encompasses also the various limits on donations permittable to be accepted by political parties, limits on parties‘ business activities, or the legal fees that parties are obliged to pay to enter certain types of elections. The strategy drive is the causal agent that is predominantly formed by parties‘ free decisions on how they wish to conduct their day-to-day activities and their election campaigning. On the income side, the strategy drive is represented by the amount of membership fees collected, donations accepted or loans taken out. On the expenditure side, the strategy drive is the formula by which political parties allocate their financial assets to the various activities each political party carries out: office operations, administrative work for their elected representatives and officials, education of party members and promotion towards the public in general, election campaigning. Both concepts are of interest for the analysis and all their segments are used to assess the various structural features of party budgets. Original data collected for the work show that parties in their lifetime go through an evolution of their budgets, from one relying mostly on private donations and spending the majority of assets on elections to one relying on membership fees, state subsidies in the case of an electoral sucess, and spending a larger part of assets on activities not related to election campaigning. The specific shape of budget evolution depends largely on the size of their budget – parties with smaller budgets feature also a different budget structure than parties with budgets larger. This rule applies across the spectrum, from the largest parties in the dataset to the smallest one. The quantitative data on budget sizes are in the work translated into meaningful, categories based on budget sizes. , The categories are labeled weight classes, mimicking the weight classes found in the boxing world, from bantamweight parties, with annual budgets up to €10 thousand, to super heavyweight parties, with annual budgets over €10 million. All parties in the researched countries are thus be classified. Based on these categories, is it shown that the largest, super heavy parties in East Central Europe receive the bulk of all public funding. The model of subsidies 5 distribution differs in the researched countries and the numbers show that it is difficult to assess whether one system is more cartelised than the other on the basis of distributed state subsidies. Easier and less arguable is to assess the relative transparency of the models of party regulations and regulations of party funding in each of the researched country. Austria, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia and Poland are in the recent time undergoing a turn towards more transparency, with new laws already in place or currently being adopted. The Czech Republic is noticeably lagging behind. The last phenomenon discussed in the work is that certain features of budgets, including its size and structure, correlate with certain party strategies. Parties of certain budget size and structure have different campaigning strategies, different policies and different opinions than parties of different budget size and structure. The collected data shows links between several variables, such as parties with large subsidies share in their budgets see as legitimate larger subsidies share than parties without subsidies, or heavyweight and middleweight parties spend a significantly larger share of their election expenses on the Internet than super heavyweight parties. Finally is discussed the behaviour of a specific set of parties that are in the researched dataset mostly found in the heavyweight and middleweight class. These parties have different campaign strategies, keep their election campaign spending higher than the rest and their budgets do not go through the same evolutionary shift as do the budgets of other parties. They do not increase their fee-paying membership and do not sustain significant day-to-day activities not directly related to election campaigning. These parties are since 2007 at the latest most successful in challenging the ‘cartel’ established by larger parties in national parliaments. The set of these parties overlaps in a large part with the set of ‘populist’ parties as discussed in other, ideology and party programme-oriented literature. Or, if restated, the populist parties are in their majority distinguished not only by their programmatic profile, but also by the structure of their budgets and related party strategy features. Ultimately, the work provides a lot of empirical evidence for the discussion of the concept of ‘cartel’ in the region of East Central Europe. It supports with hard data some of the old folk theorems and creates a firm data and conceptual basis for further research of party funding in East Central Europe.
American Political Science Review, 2002
This book is about the motivations of political actors. Many of the most commonly used models of party competition and government formation are grounded in explicit assumptions about the motivations of party strategists. These tend to assume one of three basic and interrelated motivations—the desire to fulfill policy objectives, the desire to control the perquisites of office, and the desire to maximize votes. While recognizing that living and breathing people may be driven by any or all of these motivations, among others, and that these may interact with each other in complex ways, most theorists ground their models in assumptions of policy-seeking OR office-seeking OR vote-maximizing by key political decision makers. Indeed this distinction between motivational assumptions is one of the most common ways to classify models of party competition. In part the grounding of models in a single motivational assumption is for the sake of analytical tractability; in part it is because the h...
Direct public funding of political parties: Between proxy measures and hard data
Party Politics, 2021
This article presents an original dataset of direct public funding (DPF) of political parties across 27 post-communist regimes from the outset of transition until 2020. It represents the first systematic, and detailed account of the actual level of DPF provided to parties outside established democracies in terms of geographical and temporal coverage. The dataset has a panel format and includes information on DPF per registered voter and cast ballot separately and in aggregate for more than 800 country-year observations and more than 200 election campaigns. The analysis unveils substantial cross-national and within-country variation in the level of DPF, as well as between statutory and election financing. Despite an increasing reliance of political parties on the state, no pattern exists regarding the dynamics of access and distribution rules. It also highlights the limitations and risks entailed by the extensive use of various proxies such as dichotomous indicators, composite regulatory indexes, or perception-based measures that do not capture cross-national and within-country variation either in DPF or other dimensions of political financing regime.
Public financing, party membership and internal party competition
European Journal of Political Research, 1996
The relative decline in party membership in West-European countries over the last three decades is an accepted fact in the comparative literature on party organization. However, the bare facts do not explain the reasons for such decline and may leave the feeling that the process is irreversible. A number of scholars relate party membership decline to the introduction of public finance of political parties. They suggest that public financing laws and related arrangements have a negative effect on efforts to mobilize party membership, leading to a decline in political participation. In this article, drawing mainly on the Israeli experience, I argue that public funding does not necessarily lead to membership decline, but that changes in the internal competition rules for electing party candidates to national or local posts may affect party membership more than any other variable. Thus, the decline in membership that has been considered to be irreversible, is in fact highly reversible.