La economia politica de las reformas de la financiacion electoral

In: Revista española de ciencia política, Heft 15, S. 47-65

Abstract

Spain reformed its campaign finance law twice in the first half of the nineties. Political parties that passed the new legislation claimed that their aims were equity & checking government spending in a time of recession. However they used the legal changes to attain mainly other non-declared goals such as solving their financial problems by shifting campaign costs to public budgets & improving their credibility badly damaged by the fund raising scandals reported by the media. A principal outcome of the reforms was to set an effective cap to electoral expenditure. In our view this would have not been feasible in the late seventies or eighties. Then the parties confronted a situation of parametric choice, trapped in a prisoner's dilemma in which each party had to spend more in order to prevent their rivals from getting electoral advantage. But in the early nineties the two largest parties, ridden with problems of soaring electoral debts & disgruntled voters, used the reform of electoral finance as a coordination device to achieve a Pareto efficient equilibrium. Tables, References. Adapted from the source document.