Politics: A Broken Campaign Finance System
The crisis of credibility of political parties that has festered as part of the broader political crisis of the past three years was magnified in the last two weeks amid calls for the public funding of parties to be redirected to earthquake victims and reconstruction efforts. That clamor underscores the need to seriously address many problems with the current system, most importantly the vast amounts of money spent on campaigns (most of it entirely off the books) and the varied sources of such funding; excessively long campaign periods; and the patronage-based style of election campaigns, and the extent to which they are both over-regulated and woefully lacking in effective transparency and accountability mechanisms. But calls for slashing such funding also overlook the serious issues that justified the shift to public financing of political activity in the first place.
Since the political reform of 1996, it was agreed that parties and campaigns be funded primarily with public resources to minimize excessive influence from powerful business interests, corporatist organizations, and especially organized crime. Government financing was also seen as potentially more transparent than private funding, and the arrangement was designed to level the playing field for a broader spectrum of political currents including small parties, many of which would quickly lose their ballot status if public funding were slashed.
The myriad problems with the current system include the ways in which the volunteer activities of party supporters and citizen activists are increasingly sidelined by people who get involved only for pay, and parties operate with increasingly bloated bureaucracies ever more jealous of their publicly funded privileges.
But problems extend beyond public financing, as some studies suggest that public funding accounts for a relatively tiny fraction of campaign spending, with dark money from undetected sources filling the bill for schemes through which people are induced to vote in exchange for all manner of handouts or other inducements.
The way in which parties have responded to public demands that they turn over part of their public funding for 2018 campaigns and regular operations for the current year or that all public funding for parties be eliminated, does not resolve the deep social anger against parties. They can contribute to reconstruction efforts and try to momentarily appease social ire over the way they have handled such vast amounts of public funds, but such gestures will not address the real reasons they have fallen into ill repute.
Once again the parties have responded badly.
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