Campaign and Party Finance
Ingrid van Biezen
Abstract
The financing of parties and candidates is perhaps the most obscure of all political activity. The place of money on, and often beyond, the edges of what is legally and morally permissible is fostered by the spate of financial scandals that are afflicting democratic governments today. The pervasiveness of political finance scandals means that this constitutes a very real problem for contemporary democracies, with evidence suggesting that it undermines the legitimacy of political parties, politicians and potentially the democratic process itself. As the levels of popular disengagement, disaffection and cynicism are rising and as party leaders are increasingly perceived as incompetent, dishonest and corrupt, the concern for the impact of money on good governance has acquired an increased importance and attention in recent years. International non-governmental organizations and national governments in both the older advanced industrial democracies and the transitional and consolidating ones are beginning to pay more attention to the question how the problems with campaign and party financing can be best addressed. One of the most tangible products of these concerns has been the enactment of a flurry of new political finance regulations, recommendations and guidelines.
Cross-nationally, however, there continues to be relatively little understanding of the various contexts and implications of political finance regimes. This chapter addresses some of the gaps in the contemporary study of campaign and party finance by systematically exploring the variation in existing regulatory systems in light of potential explanatory factors. It examines the relevance of several structural and institutional explanations for the seemingly immeasurable variety of finance regimes, such as the pervasiveness of corruption, the level of economic development, the newness of democracy, and the type of electoral system. It finds that the type of political finance system varies between different regions across the globe, as well as with the type of electoral system. The chapter furthermore provides a typology of financing regimes, which suggests that funding systems can be modeled along three key dimensions (control of income and expenditures; transparency of donations and expenditures; availability of public funding), each of which is underpinned by a different logic and relates to a different set of democratic values.