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... Gini Index on economic inequality can be an instrument for assessing this economic background of political funding. Figure 5 shows different levels of economic inequality in OECD countries in 1985 and 2008. Regulations should take into account this background of economic inequality in countries, to assess the need of bans and limits on donations from the private sector. ...
Citations
... As mentioned previously, there is a relationship between political funding and political competition (performance in elections), implying increased financial resources may likely increase the success of a candidate/party during elections (Speck, 2013;Speck & Mancuso, 2013). In this process, what is more important than whether money determines the election result is the extent to which the "legitimacy of financing the democratic process is tainted by risks that threaten to undermine its very purpose" (OECD, 2016). ...
Transparency and accountability are the primary prerequisites to an effectively functioning political system in democratic countries. Thereby, good governance and market economy can become more sustainable, and politicians can be prevented from using their political power for private gain instead of the public interest. However, recent democratic decline around the world and, particularly, in several EU member and candidate states, has created a challenge to transparent and accountable financing of politics. This study aims to explore the extent to which recent democratic backsliding has affected the content of regulations and implementation of political financing, and vice versa, in the 27 EU member states, the UK, and seven EU candidate/potential candidate countries. We argue that in the countries where there has been a sharp decline in their corruption perception, democracy, freedoms, civil rights and liberties, and governance scores, it is expected that there will have been regression in the rules, regulations and, in particular, practices of the transparency and accountability of political financing. Our findings indicate that there is no uniform or mutual relationship between the transparency and accountability of political financing, and democracy, freedoms, corruption perception, and governance performance levels, and which appears to be the same for all European countries. In this regard, each country should be evaluated on its own merits.KeywordsTransparencyPolitical financeThe EUGovernanceDemocracy
... Accordingly, the higher or lower the donation limits, the more permissive or restrictive a CFR is. While from a normative perspective, both types of restrictions are necessary for a democratic society to prevent the translation of economic inequalities into political participation, and to diminish incentives for corruption between parties or candidates and their financial backers, there is no common agreement over the "optimal mix" of regulatory tools that would contribute to the achievement of these normative goals (Biezen, 2003;Council of Europe, 2003;OECD, 2016;Ohman & Zainulbhai, 2009;Speck & OECD, 2013;Transparency International, 2009a, 2009b. Table 2, which illustrates the score of each country across all types of restrictions on income from private sources according to IDEA's classification. ...
This comparative study examines how Post-Legislative Scrutiny (PLS) of election campaign finance regulations can help legislators to monitor and evaluate whether the laws they have passed are implemented as intended and have achieved the expected effects. Also, the study explains how PLS can be instrumental in identifying the reasons why the implementation of law may be undermined, and can show the issues that should be addressed in future legislative reforms to ensure fair and equal political competition.
The purpose of this comparative study is to assist parliamentarians, parliamentary staff, policymakers, parliamentary development practitioners, election officials, election bodies and civil society to identify shortcomings in the electoral Campaign Finance Regulations (CFR) of Moldova, Indonesia, and Nigeria; as well as to showcase the importance of Post-Legislative Scrutiny when assessing the implementation of CFR designed to ensure effective lawmaking and to hold executives and legislators accountable.
... When partisan competition gives rise to cultural polarization and tribalism, identity politics can lead people to vote against their own interests [77]. When the working structures of political organization must reach large population segments to win votes, they become dependent on money to achieve those scales, incentivizing representatives to exploit cultural divisions and fears to win votes while quietly sculpting their policy choices around the interests of their elite donors [33,75,76]. ...
The idea of liquid democracy responds to a widely-felt desire to make democracy more "fluid" and continuously participatory. Its central premise is to enable users to employ networked technologies to control and delegate voting power, to approximate the ideal of direct democracy in a scalable fashion that accounts for time and attention limits. There are many potential definitions, meanings, and ways to implement liquid democracy, however, and many distinct purposes to which it might be deployed. This paper develops and explores the "liquid" notion and what it might mean for purposes of enhancing voter choice by spreading voting power, improving proportional representation systems, simplifying or aiding voters in their choice, or scaling direct democracy through specialization. The goal of this paper is to disentangle and further develop some of the many concepts and goals that liquid democracy ideas often embody, to explore their justification with respect to existing democratic traditions such as transferable voting and political parties, and to explore potential risks in liquid democracy systems and ways to address them.
This paper studies the effects of campaign spending limits on the political entry, selection, and behavior of local politicians in Brazil. We analyze a reform that limits campaign spending for mayoral elections. The limits were implemented with a discontinuity that we exploit for causal identification. We find that stricter limits reduce reelection rates and increase political competition by attracting more candidates who are also less wealthy and rely less on self-financing. Despite their effects on electoral outcomes, stricter limits did not lead to significant short-run improvements in policy outcomes, such as in education and health. (JEL D72, O17)
What is the impact of campaign spending on votes? Does it vary across election types, political parties or electoral settings? Estimating these effects requires comprehensive data on spending across candidates, parties and elections, as well as identification strategies that handle the endogenous and strategic nature of campaign spending in multiparty systems. This paper provides novel contributions in both of these areas. We build a new comprehensive dataset of all French legislative and UK general elections over the 1993–2017 period. We propose new empirical specifications, including a new instrument that relies on the fact that candidates are differentially affected by regulation on the source of funding on which they depend the most. We find that an increase in spending per voter consistently improves candidates’ vote share, both at British and French elections, and that the effect is heterogeneous depending on candidates’ party. In particular, we show that spending by radical and extreme parties has much lower returns than spending by mainstream parties, and that this can be partly explained by the social stigma attached to extreme voting. Our findings help reconcile the conflicting results of the existing literature, and improve our understanding of why campaigns matter.
Supplementing literature study with in-depth unstructured interviews from the two dominant political parties in Ghana on how they mobilize funds, the key argument of this article is that the loss of a presidential election in Ghana is a reduction in a party’s major income streams. Unlike other studies that look at incumbency advantage in party funding from the angle of governments’ policies that weaken the opposition parties, this article analyses incumbency from their sources of funds. It fulfils two major objectives of identifying the sources of funds of political parties and establishing the link between these sources and incumbency.
