Campaign And Party Finance In North America And Western Europe

This book provides information about how policies and practices regarding public financing abroad, focusing on North America and several Western European countries, can help Americans develop their own ideas about reform possibilities.

This book is one of 23 volumes of research commissioned by the Royal Commission on Electoral Reform and Party Financing, and one of five volumes within this series dealing specifically with party and election finance. Because the issue of money in elections is as old as democracy, the experience of other countries is instructive. The studies in this volume offer Canadians information about approaches to funding political parties and elections in the United States and Western Europe. The studies by Herbert Alexander and Robert Mutch exmaine how the United States has approached issues such as contribution limits and the disclosure of election finances. The latter study provides explicit comparisons to Canada, noting the constitutional roleof the Supreme Court in each country. Jane Jenson draws on Western European experience to propose and assess reforms for the public funding for party foundations is documented by Michael Pinto-Duschinsky. The studies approach theirm aterial from a historical perspective, noting the uniqueness of the constitutions, institutions, and traditions of the countries reviewed. The authors provide background essential to any consideration of whether foreign experience might serve as a model for Canada.

All political parties need funding to play their part in the political process, yet the role of money in politics is arguably the biggest threat to democracy today. This global threat knows no boundaries, and is evident across all continents from huge corporate campaign donations in the United States and drug money seeping into politics in Latin America, to corruption scandals throughout Asia and Europe. Attempts to tackle these challenges through political finance laws and regulations are often undermined by a lack of political will or capacity, as well as poorly designed and enforced measures. This Handbook addresses the problems of money in politics by analysing political finance regulations around the world and providing guidance for reform. The chapters are divided by region; each assesses the current state of regulations in relation to its challenges and offers a series of recommendations to tackle the identified shortcomings. This contextual approach has the benefit of revealing regional trends and patterns. An additional chapter focuses on gender, reflecting the reality that women remain grossly under-represented in politics, and how the increasing influence of money in politics perpetuates this inequality.

This handbook provides a general description of the different models of political finance regulations and analyses the relationship between party funding and effective democracy. The most important part of the book is an extensive matrix on political finance laws and regulations for about 100 countries. Public funding regulations, ceilings on campaign expenditure, bans on foreign donations and enforcing an agency are some of the issues covered in the study. Includes regional studies and discusses how political funding can affect women and men differently, and the delicate issue of monitoring, control and enforcement of political finance laws.

On cover & title page: Integrated project "Making democratic institutions work"

The recent debate on the role of money in politics has shed the light on the challenges of political finance regulations. What are the risks associated with the funding of political parties and election campaigns? Why are existing regulatory models still insufficient to tackle those risks?

Parties of the extreme right have experienced a dramatic rise in electoral support in many countries in Western Europe over the last two and a half decades. This phenomenon has been far from uniform, however, and the considerable attention that the more successful right-wing extremist parties have received has sometimes obscured the fact that parties of the extreme right have not recorded high electoral results in all West European democracies. Furthermore, the electoral scores of these parties have also varied over time, with the same party recording low electoral scores in one election but securing high electoral scores in another. This book, available in paperback for the first time, examines the reasons behind the variation in the electoral fortunes of the West European parties of the extreme right in the period since the late 1970s. It proposes a number of different explanations as to why certain parties have performed better than others at the polls and it investigates each of these different explanations systematically and in depth. As well as offering a comprehensive analysis of the reasons behind the uneven electoral success of the West European parties of the extreme right, this book provides up-to-date information on all right-wing extremist parties that have contested elections at national level across Western Europe since the late 1970s. In addition to examining the parties’ ideology and organisation, it discusses their relationship with the parties of the mainstream, and it investigates the impact that electoral institutions have on their ability to attract votes. This book is aimed at both scholars and students interested in the extreme right, in party politics and in comparative politics more generally.

Scrutinizing a relatively new field of study, the Handbook of Political Party Funding assesses the basic assumptions underlying the research, presenting an unequalled variety of case studies from diverse political finance systems.

Money is a necessary component of any democracy: it enables political participation, campaigning and representation. However, if it is not effectively regulated, it can undermine the integrity of political processes and institutions, and jeopardize the quality of democracy. Therefore, regulations related to the funding of political parties and election campaigns, commonly known as political finance, are a critical way to promote integrity, transparency and accountability in any democracy. Political finance regulations must adapt and adjust to political, economic and societal changes. This report contributes to the discussion of the future of political finance by exploring the following trends, opportunities and challenges related to money in politics that need to be taken into consideration when improving political finance systems: · mainstreaming political finance regulations into an overall anti-corruption framework; · supporting the implementation of existing political finance regulations and monitoring their performance; · harnessing digital technologies to ensure transparency and accountability in political finance; and · designing targeted political finance measures to encourage the inclusion of underrepresented groups in politics.

In this book, an international team of specialists reflects, more than a dozen years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, on the implications of that momentous conjuncture for the study of party politics in Europe. In particular, the authors and editors seek to address two inter-connected questions: To what extent is there evidence of convergence in patterns of party politics across Eastern and Western Europe? And how far has the theory of parties and party systems coped with the emergence of democratic politics in Eastern Europe? In a wideranging and stimulating set of essays, these issues are confronted in respect of themes such as the impact of institutional contexts like electoral systems and presidentialism, the evolving nature of cleavage structures, party organizational developments, and intra-party factionalism. This book will make a significant addition to any course reading list on comparative and party politics.