Two posts ago, I posted exerpts from the NY Times report on ex-politicians and candidates benefiting from leftover campaign funds. Today, I was reading the epilogue in Frank Sorauf’s Inside Campaign Finance, where he recounts how the same question – at least with respect for spending during campaigns – was addressed by the FEC. While [...]

South Africa’s ruling ANC was the recipient of significant criticism for its “Progressive Business Forum” – a paid-entry meeting for businesses to have access to ministers and party leaders – which it held last week. The practice, which looks suspiciously like “toll-gating,” was defended by the ANC as standard international practice and the critcism as a “clear case of [...]

The New York Times reports today that retired politicians and defeated candidates in New York often still have vast sums of campaign cash remaining, and that they continue to spend that money on things that only by a stretch of the imagination seem to connect to campaigns. While some candidates have donated leftover money to charity, others [...]

On tuesday, the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) of Mexico published the “minimum costs” for the campaigns of federal deputies (in the single-member districts), senators, and presidents for 2007 (El Universal). Not that there are federal elections in Mexico this year – rather, these “mininum costs” are the inflation-indexed amounts used to determine the amount of public funding [...]

The measure, which is being considered with a host of other reforms to reform lobbying and create an agency to investigate ethics claims, now goes to Senate. The measure makes contributions limits to state candidates the same as those at the federal level. The Las Cruces Sun-News writes:
House Bill 821 would limit donations to political campaigns [...]

In the wake of several corruption scandals, including the revelation that the state has been secretly giving parties in the ruling Concertación lump sums of money, the Concertación has propsed holding meetings to discuss the public funding of political parties. Parties and candidates already receive subsidies for presidential and parliamentary elections; the new proposal to [...]

McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal’s far-reaching new book, Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches, shows with a wealth of data that for at least the past 100 years, there has a strong relationship between income inequality in the economy and political polarization in Congress. Currently, political polarization – measured using their NOMINATE analysis [...]

Over the weekend, Sanjay Singh at dnaindia.com wrote about the fake parties in India that were used as tax shelters, which I’ve posted on previously. I’m posting almost the whole article since it is so interesting – with 600 new parties in five years, I wonder what all their names were…? I wonder also if the “fake politicians” are [...]

Representatives from political parties met at a seminar (along with electoral and legal professionals) on Monday to discuss reducing the cost of campaigns and politics in Mexico. Elections in Mexico have been considered notoriously expensive, and perhaps reducing their cost is a good thing, but whether that can happen may be another matter. According to [...]

Trasparency Brazil released the results of a report today that estimates that 8.3M voters were asked if they would sell their vote (”compra de votos”) in the October 1 state and federal elections. The report says that the problem is not getting better but worse since they began studying vote buying in 2000. Their report [...]

Last week the 2007 distribution of public funding to political parties appeared in the state journal, following the official decree a few weeks earlier. Parties’ annual subsidies total 80 million Euro, but with the penalty for not following gender parity in the nomination of candidates, parties were fined about 7 million euro of the half of the [...]

In an effort to stave off the death of the public financing system for presidential campaigns, candidate Barak Obama proposed that the candidates that reach the general election should make an agreement to return donations and take the public funding. It is a proposal that might work, but given the political polarization between the parties [...]

Jose Miguel Insulza, Secretary General of the Organization of American States, offered assistance to Jamaica to help reform their campaign finance system and adopt state funding of parties. The Jamaica Gleaner News reports that Insulza, who is Chilean (not Peruvian as claimed in the report), said:
…the OAS was prepared to assist its members financially, and [...]

The Dominican Today reports the public funding to be disbursed to parties for this year. I do not know the rule which determines the distribution of funds, but it seems that each of the parties that passed the 5% threshold in the 2006 legislative elections get equal amounts of funding – RD$6.6M each – even though [...]

The Washington Post today ran a lengthy story about the fundraising for the 2008 presidential election, which by the end promises to be the first $1B presidential contest. “Megastar” candidates, new technologies, and rising travel costs (in part due to fewer trips on corporate jets) all contribute to the rising costs. But the high and [...]

An op-ed reprinted from the Daily Champion on AllAfrica.com highlighted new spending and contribution limits introduced by Nigeria’s Independent National Electoral Commission, but casted doubt on the efficacy of the new rules. The new “guidelines” include campaign expenditure limits for all national candidates (presidential, gubernatorial, and legislative) and contribution limits of N$100,000 for anonymous contributions. Candidates and [...]

The Chilean Congress is considering campaign finance reforms introduced by President Michelle Bachelet, and they are likely to pass in some form or another given that they were introduced after a series of scandals (involving the misuse of public funds and lying on campaign finance disclosure reports from December 2005’s legislative elections) hurt the governing [...]

The IDEA handbook describes “macing” and “toll-gating” as:
Toll-gating – the practice of demanding a contribution to party coffers in exchange for the granting of permits or licenses.
Macing – the practice of requiring public servants to make contributions to the party in power in order to keep their jobs or to promote their careers.
I looked up [...]

The year-end accounts of the US Congressional Campaign Committees were due to the FEC this week, and the Republican House Committee – a PAC designed to help Republican candidates to House elections – is the big debt-holder, reporting $14,386,926 in debt. The Democrats’ committee, the DCCC, filed a report with $9,311,416 in debt. (More at [...]