Edited books are never consistent across all chapters, but like this one, they can be fun. The book's organization is straightforward: a brief introduction, three increasingly specific theoretical chapters, and seven country case studies covering Latin Europe (Italy, Spain, and France), Britain, and South America (Colombia, Venezuela, Chile, and Uruguay).
The editors set out three big questions. First, how do political parties and candidates fund both ongoing activities and electoral campaigns? This question has multiple levels: What are the laws? Are they enforced? What are their results, in terms of both financial flows and political behaviors? The chapters on Europe principally explore the consequences of political financing patterns for government corruption, while the South American chapters map political financing in each country, either via a legislative and policy history of recent financing reforms, as in the selections on Chile (by Manuel Antonio Garretón) and Colombia (Fernando Cepeda Ulloa), or by illuminating critical twists in the money trail, as in the chapters on Venezuela (Diego Bautista Urbaneja) and Uruguay (Angel Eduardo Alvarez).
We have here tidbits for the connoisseur of political trivia, such as the claim by Justin Fisher that about 80% of spending by the British Conservative and Labour Parties is “routine” and in the nature of ongoing fixed costs not directly related to a general election, a funding pattern that creates a cash-flow problem, since voluntary donations reach their peak in the run-up to an election (pp. 116–17). There is also ample material for those in search of researchable theoretical hypotheses. For example, the discussions of Italy, by Véronique Pujas and Martin Rhodes, and Colombia, by Ulloa, suggest that cross-party power-sharing arrangements, once they become routinized, tend to institutionalize clientelism, graft, and kickbacks within the state. Those currently proposing power-sharing solutions to postconflict or highly polarized states may wish to note this plausible long-term consequence.
Second, what do private political contributors expect in return? Political contributors may simply support substantive policy positions, legitimately giving money to the candidate best embodying their preferences. Laurence Whitehead, erudite as always, observes that moral outrage at the existence of seepage between the formally impermeable spheres of money and politics would be naive. Of course, the wealthy invest in political access. We can acknowledge this reality, while nonetheless pursuing the promise of political equity implicit within democracy. Both Whitehead and Emilio Lamo de Espinosa emphasize that democratic legitimacy depends on citizens trusting government. In Lamo de Espinosa's careful terminology, one problem arises because voters react to perceptions of government corruption (that is, an elected official providing a favor to a contributor, and thus both parties cheating the citizenry at large) by conceptualizing fraud (a citizen cheating the state, as through tax evasion) as morally acceptable. He also raises the intriguing question of why political corruption exists. Is it a case of incomplete modernization, “a sort of ethical transition following political and economic transitions” (pp. 31 ff.), or instead a question of economic incentives created by particular institutional designs, such as the 1990s decisions in many countries of both Europe and Latin America to privatize large portions of the state without adequate regulatory oversight (pp. 39–42)?
Contributors often do seek favors. Kevin Casas-Zamora's description of “friendliness” in Uruguay (pp. 220–24) offers pithy examples of the “delicate” quid pro quo between politicians and contributors. And what if party activists employ otherwise legitimate funds to “reward” potential voters (“vote-buying”), as in several of the Latin American cases discussed? An even more pernicious practice, though not one much discussed in the volume, is use of party funds to purchase the votes of wavering members of a multiparty legislative coalition, as recently occurred in Brazil's mensalão (monthly stipend) scandal, in which the ruling Workers Party (PT) distributed allowances to friendly federal deputies from other parties.
Third, does public financing of campaigns and parties constitute an important piece of the solution to unequal access for the wealthy? Parties of the Left, whose natural partisans are poorer, tend to believe so—but sadly, several European leftist parties have been among those recently accused of corruption. Pujas and Rhodes (pp. 70 and passim) in their chapter on Western Europe suggest that the problem is not public financing per se, but rather a combination of opportunity (inadequate checks and balances) and heightened incentives to incumbents due to increased partisan political competition (see also Pilar del Castillo on Spain). Another question is whether public financing tends to institutionalize spoils distribution while keeping new ideas and parties permanently shut out—a concern running particularly through the South American chapters. The countries profiled here, excepting Britain, all have substantial public financing of politics, though the Latin Americans are moving toward greater use of public financing, while the Europeans are inching back toward greater use of private funds. The other institutional option is the Anglo-American system of caps on private contributions from individuals and firms, often accompanied by prohibitions on certain donations, for example, from foreigners or state-owned enterprises. It is interesting to note that the United States is among the increasing number of countries that prohibit political contributions from noncitizens—although the U.S. National Endowment for Democracy proudly finances partisan campaigns abroad.
In a refreshing admission, the contributors openly acknowledge the volume's most notable flaws, which are the lack of a tight comparative framework and similar data across cases. Eduardo Posado-Carbo's introduction laments the dearth of good cross-national data, even for the advanced industrial democracies. Like Michael Pinto-Duschinsky, I cannot resist repeating Elizabeth Drew's informant's quip that the less-than-perfect disclosure rules in the United States lead to “over-regulating the penguins on the tip of the iceberg” (p. 67). Pinto-Duschinsky also recalls that until recently political finance was not thought a respectable subject for scholarly study (p. 56). A quick Web search did lead this reviewer to relevant cross-national data on “Governance and Corruption” at the World Bank (www.worldbank.org) and a series of country papers on comparative political financing at the National Institute for Democracy (www.accessdemocracy.org), and so perhaps the topic finally is catching on. One hopes so.
