1. State funding and party primaries (original) (raw)

Unaccounted Competition: The Finance of Intra-Party Elections

In most countries, national, inter-party elections are financed and regulated by national authorities, while there is little interference or supervision of intra-party elections. This is especially true in countries with proportional representation or mixed electoral systems. In this article I question the wisdom of ignoring the regulation of intra-party elections and examine the pitfalls created by regulating only one part of the democratic electoral process, i.e. national elections, while leaving the preliminary cycle of leadership and candidate selection, which takes place largely within the parties, open to free, uncontrolled and unsupervised competition.

Party Financing and the Entrance of New-Party Candidates

The literature on party finance regulations has increasingly found evidence of its impact on the structure and characteristics of the party system. This paper extends the literature by disaggregating the effect of different types of funding (campaign vs ongoing), and their allocation mechanisms, on the number of new-party presidential candidates that compete in presidential elections. This paper argues that subsidies for campaigns based on past electoral results create a barrier to the entrance candidates sponsored by new parties. However, this effect can be counteracted by the potential to access post-election benefits in the form of ongoing party funding. The empirical results provide evidence in favour of these arguments and are robust to a wide range of model specifications and definitions of new-party candidate. Substantively, the results indicate that the design of party funding regulations can have significant consequences for the stability of the party system.

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.

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.

Development of Political Parties and Party Funding: Models and Characteristics

The first modern political parties were formed at the end of the 18 th century and have, from those times up to now, undergone 4 developing phases; each of the phases is bound to ideal-type political party model: cadre parties, mass parties, catch-all parties and cartel parties. Each of these party models differentiates in various characteristics: party foundation, number of members, and way of leading the election campaigns, but also in ways of financing. This paper describes the above mentioned 4 phases of political parties' development and 4 phases of parties' finances development; it will be analysed in detail positive and negative sides of each of the models of party financing.

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.

Party Primaries in Comparative Perspective

2015

Primary elections for choosing party leaders and candidates are now becoming commonplace in Europe, Asia and America but questions as to how much they hinder a party’s organizational strength and cohesion or affect electoral performance have largely been ignored outside of the USA. Party Primaries in Comparative Perspective gives a much-needed conceptualization to this topic describing the function and nature of primary elections and providing a comparative analytical framework to the impact of primaries on the internal and external functioning of political parties. Elaborating on the analytical tools developed to study the US experience this framework engages with primary elections in Europe and Asia offering a theoretical, comparative and empirical account of the emergence of party primaries and an invaluable guide to internal electoral processes and their impact.