This paper analyzes the overall spending levels of political parties. In the past decades, nearly all European countries have introduced some form of public funding of political parties. Along with these state subsidies transparency regulations were often introduced as well, leading to the availability of a vast amount of party finance data. This trend allows researchers to make in-depth and cross-national investigations on revenues and expenditures of political parties. Until now, empirical research in the field of party finance mainly focused on the revenues of political parties (e.g. state funding, donations), as well as on campaign spending. But party spending should not simply be reduced to campaign spending, since parties also invest considerable amounts of money in, for instance, staff, housing and administration. In this paper, we therefore focus on the parties’ total annual expenses, as this aspect of party finance has largely been neglected in research up to now.
Recently, however, some (largely descriptive and exploratory) comparative studies on party spending have emerged, for instance analyzing how the overall expenses of parties have evolved over time. One of the more implicit findings in these studies is that the expenses strongly differ both between parties as well as over time. And these differences are still to be unraveled: it is not clear yet which factors influence the spending levels of individual parties. In other words, which variables explain that some parties are characterized by high levels of spending, while others are more cost efficient? Previous studies have already pointed out the importance of both party-level (e.g. age, strength, ideology) and country-level variables (e.g. party system, tradition of democracy), but robust statistical analyses are still missing. This paper therefore examines the levels of overall party spending on the basis of data from the annual accounts of 99 parties from nine European parliamentary democracies by means of multilevel techniques.
