Tag Archives: campaign finance

Political Finance Regulation and Perceived Corruption: Some Preliminary Exploration

Posted on by
6

Corruption is closely linked to problems associated with money in politics. Indeed, some have argued that an excessive/inappropriate influence of money on elections is corruption (even if it’s not necessarily illegal or currently viewed as unethical). Even for those who (like me) prefer a more restrictive definition of “corruption,” it is widely believed that these issues are related. Many hypothesize that countries with weak or ineffective systems of political finance regulation may experience higher levels of corruption—though at the same time excessively onerous, unrealistic regulations on political spending may also induce corruption in order to circumvent the official rules. Perhaps surprisingly, though, we do not have (or at least I have not yet seen) very much quantitative, comparative research on the relationship between the quality of countries’ laws on the regulation of political finance, on the one hand, and the extent of their corruption problems, on the other.

This may be starting to change, thanks in part to initiatives like the Money, Politics and Transparency (MPT) forum (a collaborative venture of the Sunlight Foundation, Global Integrity, and the Electoral Integrity Project). A few weeks back Rick posted a highly critical assessment of MPT’s volume Checkbook Elections, a collection of qualitative case studies. I haven’t yet read that report, but here I wanted to focus on another aspect of MPT’s work: a quantitative index that purports to measure how well 54 different democratic countries regulate political finance, based on responses to 50 survey questions in five different categories (public funding of elections, contribution and expenditure restrictions, reporting and disclosure, regulation of third-party actors, and monitoring/enforcement). The surveys include questions about both law and practice in all five categories; moreover, in addition to a composite index score, MPT also provides separate scores for the quality of electoral regulation both “in law” and “in practice.” (A detailed description of the methodology is available here.) All the usual caveats and concerns regarding these sorts of composite indexes of course apply here, but at first pass this seems like a useful resource, and potentially helpful in teasing out the relationships between political finance regulation and corruption more generally.

Real progress on this will front require careful research design, more extensive data, and the application of rigorous empirical methods—an enterprise for which I lack both the time and the talent. But just for fun, I played around a bit to see how the MPT index (and each sub-index) correlates with the 2014 Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI). Are countries with better regulation of political finance (in law, in practice, or overall) perceived as more corrupt? Less corrupt? I’ll tell you what I found after the break, but just for fun take a guess now, before you know the answer!

OK, here’s what I found: Continue reading →

Money in Politics: Can’t Experience Teach Us Anything?

Posted on by
Reply

My complaint in last week’s post that Checkbook Elections, the recent study of campaign and party finance rules in 11 countries, failed to offer any guidance for reformers drew a sharp and quick retort from University of Sussex researcher Samuel Power.  Power says I didn’t like the study because it didn’t produce a “one-size fits all” solution to the problem of controlling money in politics.  That search for the holy grail of campaign and party finance is misguided, he says, for reforms are context specific.  When a reformer, Power writes, asks a money-in-politics guru “. . . for ‘guidance on what works,’ the (sensible) answer is very likely to be ‘well it depends. . . .’”

But depends on what Mr. Power?  Climate?  Latitude?  Ethnolinguistic  fractionalization?   Continue reading →

Money in Politics: Can it be Controlled?

Posted on by
1

The research consortium Money, Politics, and Transparency recently released Checkbook Elections, a summary of a two year, multi-million dollar project to examine the role of money in politics.  A principal aim of the study was to identify “what works, what fails, and why” when countries reform laws governing campaign and party finance.  To answers to these questions, researchers analyzed how and why governments regulate the financing of political campaigns and political parties, drawing on case studies of regulation in Brazil, Britain, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, Sweden, and the United States.

Checkbook Elections‘ authors tout the results, asserting the volume provides “several core findings” which offer “important lessons for policy makers both domestically and internationally wishing to support countries in their reform trajectories.” Unfortunately for those looking for ideas on what kinds of campaign and party finance reforms might help control corruption, this is hype.  The text offers but a few lessons.  None are new or terribly important or generalizable.  The study, however, does contain an important conclusion, one which the authors are candid enough to report even if they don’t feature it. Continue reading →

Why is Corruption so Hard to Define?

Posted on by
6

Last week Matthew wrote that too much time and energy has been wasted trying to define corruption.  While I agree, I don’t think sufficient attention has been paid to why so many spend so much time arguing about what “corruption” means.  Matthew pointed to the reason in one of the first posts on this blog but stopped just short of the explanation.   Let me take the last, short step in the hopes it will end the interminable, unproductive wrangling over definitions.

In the earlier post Matthew wrote that corruption “implies a deviation from some ideal state” and hence “involves an implicit or explicit selection of a baseline standard of ‘correct’ behavior.”  He went on to explain that in the corruption literature the three most common baselines are the law, public opinion, and public interest.   “Corruption” can then be conduct that deviates from what the law provides, that diverges from what the public thinks is wrongful, or that is at odds with the public interest.  The definition of “corruption” depends upon the baseline; each baseline, as Matthew explained, leads to a different approach to defining “corruption.”

With one slight emendation, Matthew is correct.  But I think making that correction is important for taking the analysis the next step and, I hope, ending, or at least reducing, fruitless debate over definitions. Continue reading →

Williams-Yulee and Why It’s Time for America to Stop Electing Judges

Posted on by
9

For casual news fans and avid U.S. Supreme Court junkies alike, the past week’s headlines have been dominated, not surprisingly, by stories about Obergefell v. Hodges, the same-sex marriage case.  But there’s another story that emerged from the Court this week that deserves special attention in this forum:  Williams-Yulee v. Florida Bar Association. In that case — issued the day after oral argument in Obergefell — the Court once again waded into America’s longstanding but peculiar experiment with judicial elections.

For more than 150 years, the United States has stood apart from most of the world in its practice of electing judges; today, 39 U.S. states elect at least some judges and 87% of state court judges will stand for an election at some point in their careers. Why this fascination with judicial elections? Well, it can be chalked up to the populist origins of the practice — as a measure for combating corrupt patronage networks in the mid-1800s — and the belief that elections render judges more democratically accountable.

But as states like Florida have learned, judicial elections never lived up to their populist promise. In fact, there was a time, not so long ago, when corruption ruled Florida’s judiciary. The stories abound: There was the judge in the late 1960s who required lawyers to contribute to his campaign before they could argue. Even more embarrassing were the three members of the Florida Supreme Court who resigned in the early 1970s after getting caught pressuring lower courts to rule in favor of the justices’ campaign donors, allowing an interested party to ghostwrite an opinion, and enjoying a gambling spree in Las Vegas courtesy of a dog track that was litigating a case before the court. The reason for this gap between theory and practice: the need to raise campaign funds undercuts judicial integrity and invites quid pro quo corruption.

Now, Williams-Yulee turned out to be a victory for anticorruption: the Court held that Florida could bar judicial candidates from personally soliciting campaign contributions. Unfortunately, though, the victory is small and fleeting: the Court’s reasoning focused on the extremely narrow nature of the Florida rule and impliedly rejected most campaign finance restrictions in judicial elections (beyond contribution limits). So even after Williams-Yulee, states still have little in their arsenal with which to combat the evils of judicial elections. Maybe then, in an era when more and more money is flowing into judicial campaigns, Williams-Yulee ought to be our wake-up call — a sign that its time for the United States to kick the “insanely and characteristically American” habit of electing judges.

Continue reading →

Fighting Corruption:  Lessons from Eastern Europe and Central Asia

Posted on by
1

Over the last few years a number of studies have appeared analyzing the lessons learned from the first decade of anticorruption policies.  The most recent is  Why Corruption Matters: Understanding Causes, Effects and How to Address Them reviewed March 18 on this blog.  Others are: the U4 Anticorruption Resource Center’s Mapping Evidence Gaps in Anticorruption; Kennedy School Professor Rema Hanna and colleagues’ The Effectiveness of Anticorruption Policy: What has Worked, What Hasn’t, and What We Know; The Norwegian Aid Agency’s Joint Evaluation of Support to Anticorruption Efforts, 2002 – 2009; Contextual Choices in Fighting Corruption: Lessons Learned by Hertie School Professor Alina Mungiu-Pipidi and associates; the report by GRECO, or the Group of States against Corruption, Lessons Learnt from the Three Evaluation Rounds (2000 – 2010): Thematic Articles; and the analysis by the World Bank’s Independent Evaluation Group, A Review of World Bank Support for Accountability Institutions in the Context of Governance and Anticorruption. While each merits study, I thought it useful to highlight some of the important findings of each in a series of posts over the coming weeks.

Today’s entry summarizes a valuable contribution to this “lessons learned” literature by the Anticorruption Network for Eastern Europe and Central Asia, a regional outreach program of the OECD’s Working Group on Bribery whose members include the nations of Eastern Europe and Central Asia and OECD member states.  As part of the network’s activities eight countries – Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan – volunteered to have their anticorruption policies judged by their peers against the standards in the United Nations Convention Against Corruption, other international conventions, and international best practice.  Anticorruption Reforms in Eastern Europe and Central Asia: Progress and Challenges, 2009 -2013 sums up the lessons from the latest round of review of these eight countries efforts to combat corruption. Continue reading →

Prosecuting Elected Officials for Corruption: A Tale of Four Governors

Posted on by
2

As Phil and Rick pointed out a few months ago, America’s domestic anti-bribery laws and the attendant court interpretations are, for lack of a better term, a hot mess. In principle, the crime of bribery is straightforward: To secure a conviction, the prosecutor need only convince the jury that (1) there was some agreement (explicit or otherwise) whereby (2) the official would receive something of value (3) in exchange for using his official position in some manner. Unfortunately, though, that burden of proof often becomes far more complicated when the alleged bribe recipient is a high-ranking elected official. When a politician regularly solicits campaign contributions and simultaneously wields political influence to the benefit of constituents, it is often hard to see where politics ends and corruption begins. And after the U.S. Supreme Court’s decisions in cases like Citizens United and Skilling, prosecutors are left wondering when the corrupting influence of money on politics can still be prosecuted as “corruption.”

Today, I want to step back from this confusion and distill a few lessons that I believe still hold true for any US prosecutor investigating an elected official for bribery. To do that, I consider allegations that have been made against four past and present governors — Rod Blagojevich (Illinois), Andrew Cuomo (New York), Don Siegelman (Alabama), and Robert McDonnell (Virginia) — and ask one loaded question: what does it take to prove that an elected official misused his position in exchange for something of value?

Continue reading →

Is Corruption Destroying American Democracy? Zephyr Teachout’s Corruption in America – The Discussion Continues

Posted on by
Reply

Last week I critiqued Fordham University Law Professor Zephyr Teachout’s new book, Corruption in American: From Benjamin Franklin to Citizens United.  Professor Teachout claims that campaign contributions and lobbying by private interests threatens American democracy and drastic reform is urgently needed.  I complained that she was ignoring the current scholarship on the effect of money on American democracy and that it tells a much different story than the one she recounts. Two commentators, Harvard Law Professor John Coates and Dutch Professor Maurits Breul, replied to my critique.  I thank both for prompting me to think harder about Professor Teachout’s book and its arguments.

Having done so, I am even more convinced that the book’s most glaring weakness is its failure to acknowledge, let alone engage with, the current learning on the effects of campaign spending and lobbying and that this omission is fatal to her call for reform. Continue reading →

Guest Post: The Potentially Perverse Effects of Campaign Finance Disclosure Laws

Posted on by
1

Professor Michael Gilbert from the University of Virginia Law School contributes the following guest post:

Since at least the 1970s, proponents of campaign finance regulations in the United States and elsewhere have supported mandatory disclosure of monies spent on politics.  Notwithstanding some significant loopholes, those proponents have in many respects gotten their way in the United States and many other countries. Much of the enthusiasm for disclosure is based on the notion that it helps combat a certain kind of corruption—the exchange of campaign support for policy favors. Publicizing the flow of money to politicians exposes illicit relationships and quid pro quos.  In Justice Brandeis’s famous phrase, “Sunlight is said to be the best disinfectant.”

This logic is correct but incomplete.  Disclosure does indeed provide information that officials and the public can use to combat corruption.  But, as Ben Aiken and I argue in a new paper, corrupt actors can also use that information to overcome an impediment to illegal exchanges:  lack of trust.  Private parties cannot sign enforceable contracts with politicians for quid pro quos. Instead, they must trust one another—if I give you the money today will you deliver the vote tomorrow?  That need for trust means that both sides to a potentially corrupt exchange must assess one another’s credibility. Disclosure laws can, perversely, help foster that undesirable trust. After all, disclosure of campaign donations reveals which parties reward compliant politicians; this same disclosure, combined with politicians’ voting records, reveals which politicians reward their financial supporters most consistently.  Through those channels disclosure can bring conspirators together and reduce the uncertainty that inheres in illegal transactions.  As a colleague put it, “disclosure is like match.com for criminals.” Continue reading →

Is Corruption Destroying American Democracy? Zephyr Teachout’s Corruption in America

Posted on by
4

Fordham University Law Professor Zephyr Teachout earned a place of distinction among anticorruption activists for making the fight against corruption the centerpiece of her spirited campaign to oust the incumbent in New York’s September 9 gubernatorial primary (as well as a good deal of attention on this blog, click here and here).  Her effort also deserves special recognition in academia: surely no other professor has produced evidence to undercut her own academic work so fast as Professor Teachout. Appearing days before the primary, her Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin to Citizens United contends that large private donations to political candidates so favor candidates supported by the wealthy that the future of American democracy is at risk.  Yet while preliminary figures suggest the well-known, well-organized incumbent outspent her by somewhere between 40 to 50 to 1, she did surprisingly well, polling 180,336 votes to the incumbent’s 327,150.  If money so dominates American political campaigns, it is hard to see why Professor Teachout got so far with so little. Of course, she did lose the election.  More to the point, even if she had won, her claim that money is overwhelming American elections cannot be dis-proven by a single example.  It may be that her race was an outlier and that most of the time, money does talk.  So what does the accumulated research on the influence of money on American elections show? Continue reading →