Suchergebnisse

A case for the public financing of parties is that it grants them an equal opportunity to persuade voters favouring thus a more competitive electoral contest. But a number of scholars in the field of political finance claim that public subsidies to parties foster the cartelization of political markets. This paper uses data from the Spanish political system for the years 1987-2004 to test this hypothesis. Its main finding is that strategic voting behaviour in general elections seems to have played a more important role in the observed falling number of effective parties than the cartelizing effect of public subsidies to the regular activities of parties. Adapted from the source document.

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.

Spain started the regulation of party financing in the mid seventies when democracy was restored. This paper deals with public subsidies for funding the current expenditures of political parties. It reviews the trends in legislation & practices in political finance during the last quarter of a century. Our purpose is to find out whether the observed behavior of parties is consistent with the predictions of rational choice theory. We also suggest a new way to fund the parties that in our view would do away with most of the reported shortcomings of the present system. Tables, References. Adapted from the source document.