Introduction: Comparative Party Finance

The study of party finance is underdeveloped.Unlike many areas of parties and elections, the financial aspects have tended to escape extensive academic analysis.This omission is odd since party finance matters for all sorts of reasons.The study of political finance is fundamental to the study of the workings of representative democracy.For Alexander (1989:10-12) money is an element of political power, because it buys what is not or cannot be volunteered.Moreover, money is the most important constituent because finance also dominates the organizational and electoral aspects of political life.The importance of money in politics then is fundamental, for it affects political spending (Johnston, 1985:256-77) and contributes to debates concerning political equality (Oliver, 1992;Fisher, 1999).A consensus exists in the U.S.-based scholarship, and perhaps elsewhere, that while there may be a threshold beyond which the importance of fundraising diminishes, incumbent politicians cannot even hope to get elected if they do not meet minimum fundraising requirements.Some claim that money distorts political equality and work from the premise that greater financial means will lead to greater political influence (Adamany & Agree, 1975:2-3;Ewing, 1992).It is argued that since all citizens have an equal right to political participation, so all interests should receive financial support in proportion to their adherents.The reality is, however, that often wealthy groups are represented beyond the proportion of their number.And, as a result, inequalities in money are greater than any other inequalities of the 'disaffection' (Pharr and Putnam's term) with political participation in the longestablished democracies, and disenchantment being reported in more recent experiments with democracy.Clearly, party finance is but one of several critical areas of perfectability in transparent and representative government.But taken together, the articles that follow make a case -through empirical claims and their normative implications -that party finance is a good starting point for reconsidering such issues.