Mentioning short campaign periods and limits on expenditures in privately-owned media, LatioMadrid writes that the rules governing political campaigns are more “clear” and “strict” in Spain than in Latin America, and thus that campaigns are less expensive. They fail to mention that information about campaign donations and expenditures are far more forthcoming in several Latin American countries (e.g. […]

In discussions about casino licenses, proposals have been made to ban political donations from casinos and their management, reports EMOL (spanish).

An opinion by Kipngeno Cheruiyot in the Sunday Times of Kenya writes in favor of public financing of parties in Kenya and particularly the proposal of the National Democratic Institute, which has been doing a study of political finance in Africa. The proposal sounds as though it is taken from Voting with Dollars (reviewed here), […]

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 […]

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 […]

In 2003, Chile introduced a campaign finance reform that introduced for the first time disclosure of candidates’ campaign income and expenditure, expenditure and donation limits, and direct public financing of parties and candidates. The most interesting feature of the reform were the confidential donations (aportes reservados), one of three categories of permissible sources of income to competitors […]

In the past two weeks, two sets of campaign finance irregularies have surfaced in connection with the Chiledeportes (sports’ ministry) scandal. The first involves the problems with Chiledeportes - that there were irregularities detected with the funding of at least 77 projects and that these were concentrated in the last three months of 2005 - […]