Similar Challenges – Different Outcomes: Addressing the Supply and Demand Sides of Party Funding Regulations in Post-Communist Space

In this paper I present a typology of party funding regimes based on their restrictiveness derived from the interaction of regulations pertaining to the supply and demand sides of party finances. This interaction yields four distinct types of regulatory regimes recording different levels of restrictiveness ranging from a low to a high degree with two intermediate types in between. The weakest regulatory regime records negative values on both dimensions. It therefore lacks regulations envisaging limits on donations from individuals and legal entities, on the one hand, and regulations concerning aggregate income/spending limits, on the other hand. Conversely, the harshest regulatory regime scores positive values on each dimension, thus capping individual/corporate contributions as well as aggregate income/spending. Other two types represent intermediate cases, but with a different kind of restrictiveness. Each of them records only one positive value, i.e. there are regulations limiting either individual/corporate contributions or, alternatively, only aggregate income/spending. Hence, in one case regulatory regime does not constrain parties altogether from amassing resources from individual and corporate donors in terms of amounts, but constrains them in limiting their expenditures. In the other case, on the contrary, political parties do not face any restraints in spending, while being hindered in extracting large amounts of money from the same source due to the presence of caps on individual and corporate donations. By employing this analytical framework I investigate the development of party financing regimes in post-communist space and discover a rather high variance in terms of cross-country differences and within-country variation across time. While faced with similar challenges with respect to ensuring resources for organizational survival, political parties in CEE and former Soviet Republics turned out to be governed by a diverse set of rules concerning party finances. Furthermore, restrictiveness of party funding regimes seems to be tied in a loose way to the level of democratic development of post-communist polities in the aftermath of the communism’s breakdown. More democratic countries of CEE do not seem to have adopted tighter regulations than, at least, some of their counterparts from CIS that are still lagging behind with regard to democratic achievements. Additionally, post-communist countries greatly vary regarding the stability of party financing rules. At one extreme there is a pool of countries in which the regulations on donations and spending remained almost completely untouched or, at best, have been exposed to minor changes and amendments over almost two decades after communism. At another extreme one finds a group of polities in which the magnitude and frequency of regulatory shifts was much higher, thus yielding the alteration of party financing rules in more substantive ways. The overall regulatory shift tilts towards more restrictive regimes, though there are exceptions from this rule pointing towards a deregulatory turn regarding party and campaign finances.