policy briefs/2005/in focus/news room

Introducing TI Policy Briefs on political financing:
essential tools for practitioners

TI launches its Policy Brief series with two papers explaining TI's position on political party and campaign financing and detailing the enforcement architecture necessary to render political financing regulations effective

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TI Policy Briefs:

With a new series of Policy Briefs, Transparency International outlines and explains our position on key corruption-related issues.The first two briefs of the series focus on corruption in political financing,which is one of TI's global priority areas. Other priorities, and the subjects of future Policy Briefs, are: corruption in public contracting, access to information and compliance with international anti-corruption conventions.

The reason for focusing on corruption in political party and campaign finance is that the deleterious effects of corruption in this sphere are massive and recurrent. Corruption in the funding of politics damages democracy because it undermines elections and distorts political competition. Transparency International's Global Corruption Barometer 2004 found that in 36 out of 62 countries polled, political parties were considered to be the most corrupt institution, followed by parliaments. But the damage is not confined to the electoral process. The quality of government is marred if those in power are tied to quid pro quo agreements with their donors, who expect policy favours or privileged access to government.

Sectors and institutions most affected by corruption (1 – not at all corrupt… 5 – extremely corrupt)

Source: Transparency International Global Corruption Barometer 2004

Faced with evidence that voters do care about the ways in which electoral politics is financed, governments around the world have taken steps to regulate political party and campaign financing. But too often regulations have been adopted in response to scandals. Knee-jerk responses when careful and considered lawmaking is needed, almost always result in loophole-ridden regulations that are impossible to enforce.

Capacity for enforcement therefore has to be considered when regulations are designed. This is why we have chosen to present the position paper on enforcement alongside the paper on the regulations themselves. When entrusted leaders regularly breach laws with impunity, confidence in the political system is undermined.

Transparency International has been working on the issue of corruption in the financing of political parties and campaigns since the late 1990s, when National Chapters in Latin America and later Central and Eastern Europe devised projects to monitor how much money candidates were spending on their election campaigns. Armed with evidence that the real spending was more than the declared sums, they were able to demonstrate a need for greater transparency of electoral politics. Their efforts have successfully fed into reform processes in many countries, notably Argentina and Latvia.