Sousa, Luís de
Description
In recent years, governments and legislatures have made an unprecedented effort to improve regulatory systems of political financing which had been perceived by many as fraught with corruption. Some countries have been more sensitive to the problem than others given the nature and extent of occurrences, but the successive waves of reform show how difficult it has been for the political class to arrive at an adequate control response. The reform panorama of the 1990s has been characterised by...[Show more] incremental, short-lived and non-comprehensive articulation of control
instruments and monitoring/enforcement shortcomings. The general regulatory context was one of reforming to address scandal and an increasingly discontented public opinion towards parties and their representatives. Despite different national responses and understandings of the major issues of concern, there has equally been a convergence of the type of measures adopted and an increasing cross-country transfer of knowledge about the panoply of instruments available. What this paper will argue, however, is that “similarities” concern more the form rather than the substance of control. The transfer of regulatory instruments has taken place faster than the
expected convergence of standards of conduct. Drawing from different regulatory experiences, the article deals with a series of interrelated issues of political financing regulation: liberal versus
regulatory approaches to political financing; public versus private modes of political financing; balancing revenue and expenditure; rules of publicity and publication of accounts; making parties
accountable internally and externally to monitoring bodies; matching penalties to offences. The aim is to provide a general reflection of the general features of the law and practice of political finance as a preliminary step towards more general conclusions about the challenges facing
political financing regulation today. In short, the article attempts to address two overarching questions: Do laws on political financing suffice to constrain party related illegality? Why certain countries do better than others in face of the degree of cross-country transfer of knowledge and regulatory innovation achieved in recent years?
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