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Introduction: Party Funding and Corruption in Advanced Industrial Democracies

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Party Funding and Corruption

Part of the book series: Political Corruption and Governance ((PCG))

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Abstract

This chapter outlines the various justifications behind the book, reflecting first on whether parties are essential to the functioning of democracy (they are), before assessing their role as public utilities and the links between their financing and corruption. I then describe what I hope to achieve in writing the book, before concluding with a (somewhat) detailed sketch of the structure of the chapters to come.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Though Inglehart and Norris are quick to point out, this may not be a case of either/or.

  2. 2.

    Partisanship, incidentally, also affects issues such as perceptions of economic improvement. Immediately before the presidential election, 16% of Republicans thought that the economy was getting better, compared to 61% of Democrats. Post-election, the Republicans who thought the economy was improving had tripled to 49%, whereas the Democrat figure fell to 46% (Levitz 2016).

  3. 3.

    Though the usual methodological caution applies. For example, Q36: ‘Political parties are essential to our democracy, so it would be better to fund them from the state than leave them at the mercy of big donors’ could plausibly be described as a leading question.

  4. 4.

    A notable exception is Italy which attempted to abolish some state subsidies in the 1990s (Pinto-Duschinsky 2002; Piccio et al. 2014) and succeeded in passing legislation that would gradually reduce state funding to zero (BBC News 2013a).

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  1. Department of Politics, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK

    Sam Power

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Power, S. (2020). Introduction: Party Funding and Corruption in Advanced Industrial Democracies. In: Party Funding and Corruption. Political Corruption and Governance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37580-5_1

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