Money, Parties, and Democracy

Abstract If and when the opportunity for political finance reform arises in a country, what arrangements should be put in place? Should the state fund political parties and campaigns? Or should most of that funding come from private citizens? This book argues that political finance rules should be normatively assessed in tandem with the party system which they operate alongside. More specifically, both political finance rules and party systems should be evaluated in terms of three normative dimensions of partisanship: collegiality (i.e., parties’ ability to work and cooperate across partisan lines in order to sustain liberal democratic institutions and advance the common good); systemic voice (i.e., the correspondence between citizens’ demands and parties’ manifestos); and systemic accountability (i.e., the uptake of citizens’ voice accompanied by sanctions). Based on this evaluation, the book argues that political finance rules ought to counterbalance or, at least, not exacerbate any weaknesses (in terms of collegiality, systemic voice and systemic accountability) inherent to the party system in which they are introduced, nor undermine any of its existing strengths. A set of political finance rules that satisfies these three conditions is an instantiation of what we describe as the ‘civic model’ of political finance. The book represents the first effort to integrate party systems and the normative theory of partisanship into normative theorizing on political finance and an evaluation of countries’ political finance arrangements.