The Politics of Party Funding

Abstract

During the last decade and a half, and esp ecially after the publication of Katz andMair’s (1995) seminal article on the ‘cartel party’, literature on the consequences ofpublic funding for party competition has ex perienced an important increase. How-ever, and despite such profusion of works – both quantitative and qualitative –their findings have been anything but conclusive. It is mainly for this reason thatthe time has come to change the focus of our studies from, paraphrasing Sartori(1969), the ‘funding of party politics’ to ‘the politics of party funding’.In this context, the book reviewed here constitutes one of the first scholarlyattempts to explain variance in party funding regimes. In particular, the mainobjective of the book is to understand why certain countries guaranteea substantial amount of public subsidies to parties, either in conjunctionwith private funding (Sweden) or not (Germany), while in others politicalparties have to rely exclusively on private or illegal contributions (the UnitedKingdom and France, respectively). Critical of the mono-causal explanationsprovided so far by the institutionalist literature, Kos uses a ‘most-different-systems-design’ and proceeds from the assumption that ‘consensus of therelevant parties’ is a necessary (and sufficient) condition for the introduction ofpublic (party) funding. However, conscious of the complex nature of politicalreality, in general, and institutional reform in particular, Kos distinguishesthree different triggers of such consensus: institutional, strategic and discursive.More concretely, the author expects political parties to be publicly fundedthe higher (i) the number of institutional veto points in the political system,(ii) the intensity with which parties pursue either policy- or office-seeking stra-tegies, and (iii) the social concern with political corruption.A first examination of the relationship between party competition and partyfunding is undertaken in Chapter 5. Using what are by now six traditionalsystemic indicators, the author finds the first indications of the expectedconnection between the introduction of public funding and the prevailingtype of partisan strategy. Moreover, and what is perhaps more striking, eachof the party funding reforms in Germany, Sweden and France (after 1988) was