PARLIAMENT AND DEMOCRACY - Inter-Parliamentary Union

A parliament that is accountable I 105
concern that elected representatives might become collectively more accountable
to powerful donors than to their electorates.
As we have already seen, political parties, for all the low esteem in which
they are held in most countries, play a vital role in parliamentary and political
life. To achieve any influence over public policy, citizens and parliamentarians
have to combine with like-minded others, rather than act as isolated
individuals. Political parties provide the essential ‘glue’ which holds the political
process together. They alone can offer the electorate alternative policy and
legislative programmes which stand some chance of being enacted, or of being
coherently criticised and opposed. Voters know that, by voting for a candidate
of a given party, he or she will broadly support the party’s programme and
leadership if elected to office. It is only through the predictability which
parties thus provide that the electorate can have any collective influence over
the composition and programme of a parliament.
Given their essential role, it is a matter of public interest that political
parties should be financed adequately and accountably to carry out their work
of campaigning, organisation and education. Two decades or so ago very
little was known about the financing of political parties, and they were treated
as private associations like any other, accountable only to themselves. It is
only more recently that concerns about their financing have become a public
issue, and that its relevance to electoral competition and parliamentary
accountability has been recognised as critical. We now have two large comparative
studies available which provide up-to-date evidence on party financing
across the globe, and offer suggestions for legislative improvement. These
are the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA)
Handbook, Funding of Political Parties and Electoral Campaigns, ed.
Reginald Austin and Maja Tjernstrom, Stockholm, 2003; and the National
Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI) study of party financing
in 22 developing countries, Money in Politics, by Denise Baer and Shari
Bryan, Washington DC, 2005. Together these studies provide some pointers
to good practice, though much is acknowledged to depend upon the specific
country context.
Concerns about party financing mentioned by both studies focus on the following
three problem areas:
■ inadequate resources. This problem is particularly acute in developing
countries, where finance from party membership dues is minuscule, and
candidates often have to finance their campaign expenses from personal
sources. ‘More than four out of five respondents state that they supply the