'Everything under Heaven is in Utter Chaos'. A Comparative Perspective on Party Funding in Western Europe

Party finance is one of the major organizational resources on which political parties can rely on. Among the other sources of “money”, it has been often stressed the central role played by the public funding for political parties purses. This specific trend, shared among a number of European countries, has particular implication in terms of the role political parties continue to play in democratic regimes. Moreover, in the last ten years the public funding regime of political parties has been the target of harsh criticisms by a heterogeneous group of political actors, and suffered of a very low approval rating in the public opinion. Having said that, there is no clear evidence of how political parties are acting along this specific dimension of their organizational resources. Building on a original dataset, this paper will explore patterns of party funding from the beginning of the 2000s until 2015, in four European countries - France, Germany, Italy and Spain – by looking at individual parties as the units of analysis. Both private – membership fees, private donations – and public sources of funding will be included and compared in the analysis. In particular, we want to address the following questions: What impact has had – in any – the 2008 economic crisis on party finance? What is the relationship between public and private sources of funding? In replying to these questions, we will also explore possible source of variations within and across the four countries.