[open-government] Regulating Money in Politics a Global Shortcoming

Wed Jul 31 17:17:58 UTC 2013

Hey Jonathan,

Thanks a lot for your input!

Removing money from politics seems rather impossible (parties need money
for their daily operation and candidates need money to be visible when
running for office), though I`m not quite sure this is exactly what you’re
envisioning here. Did you mean removing private money from the system?

Limiting money in politics might be a good goal, but experience shows it
doesn’t necessarily solve the problem, indeed it might be rather counter
productive by creating new illegal channels of fundraising and off the book
payments. For instance in Hungary where there are strict campaign spending
limits, but parties obviously ignore it. (See TI Hungary’s ‘hypocrisy’
campaign: http://kepmutatas.hu/english/)

Overall, we at Sunlight think transparency and granular data is the first
step to demonstrate the brokenness of the system. First you need to be able
to show exactly how much money is spent on elections or parties, where it
comes from and if it is indeed too much. And then, once you have the
necessary information in hand, you might want to consider ways to reduce
the impact of money but these solutions will largely depend on the specific
political, social and economic context. And either way, you'll need super
transparent systems to make sure there are no off the book payments.

Best,
Julia

On Tue, Jul 30, 2013 at 12:41 AM, Jonathan Brun <jbrun at jonathanbrun.com>wrote:

> Hi Julia,
>
> Interesting piece, but I think Sunlight's approach to this is wrong - or
> maybe just restricted by its mandate and location. Instead of increasing
> transparency of campaign fundraising and spending, should we not just focus
> on removing money from politics?
>
> In Québec, we just unanimously passed a law that reduces campaign funding
> to 100$ per person per year and 200$ per person during an election year. We
> also capped elections at 6 million dollars in expenditures. This, to me,
> seems like a much better solution.
>
> I dived into some details in my post on my blog, but I think we should
> just try and remove as much money from politics as possible instead of
> making a shitty system transparent.
>
> Blog post here:
> http://www.jonathanbrun.com/2013/07/personal-democracy-forum-pdf-2013-thinking-small/
>
> JB
> Je vote pour la transparence <http://jvt2013.com/fr/index>
> I Vote For Transparency <http://jvt2013.com/en/index>
> Montréal Ouvert - Québec Ouvert
>
> On 2013-07-29, at 11:28 AM, Julia Keserű <jkeseru at sunlightfoundation.com>
> wrote:
>
> (Sorry for cross-posting.)
>
>
> http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2013/07/29/regulating-money-in-politics-a-global-shortcoming/
>
> Regulating Money in Politics a Global Shortcoming<http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2013/07/29/regulating-money-in-politics-a-global-shortcoming/>
> by Júlia Keseru <http://sunlightfoundation.com/people/jkeseru/>July 29,
> 2013, 11:11 a.m.
> Open government advocates around the world (including Sunlight) are
> thrilled to see how more and more governments commit themselves to
> openness. Unfortunately, a vital piece of the transparency agenda--party
> and campaign funding--remain depressingly opaque. Because the financing
> behind how candidates and parties come to power influence later policy and
> spending decisions, it is critical that countries address political finance
> transparency. Sunlight is committed to create a strong base for reform by
> combining our efforts with other activists and sharing our expertise in a
> meaningful way.
>
> *Political finance opacity throughout the world *
>
> Recent scandals around illegal party funding practices in Spain<http://www.euronews.com/2013/01/31/spain-s-el-pais-prints-popular-party-s-secret-accounts/> or
> the turmoil in Brazil<http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/07/22/us-brazil-politics-corruption-idUSBRE96L0MS20130722> have
> again highlighted the irony, controversy and - pardon our language -
> obvious hypocrisy behind the new tide of government transparency<http://www.opengovpartnership.org/>.
> The fact that decision-makers still don’t seem to associate party and
> campaign funding transparency with government openness is utterly
> depressing, though not at all surprising.
>
> It is no use arguing against the fact that future politicians *do* need
> some sort of funding to be able to run for public office and political
> parties *cannot* operate without financial resources. But trying to
> convince decision-makers that voters, watchdog organizations, journalists
> and (oh yes!) oversight bodies must have easy and timely access to granular
> information about party and election funding seems equally challenging to
> explaining the advantages of not watching television to a 6-year old.
>
> As a result, political financing has been repeatedly rated as the “weakest
> component of countries’ anti-corruption framework” since international
> organizations and institutions (such as Transparency International, Global
> Integrity, IDEA or GRECO, the European anti-corruption monitoring body)
> began tracking the performance of national public integrity systems. If you
> want to get goosebumps (no, not the nice ones), take a look at our map<https://www.google.com/fusiontables/embedviz?q=select+col2%3E%3E1+from+1EpNSfSSF7gYTzL2K8jDkZtGZHUOYgpC0iOS28AY&viz=MAP&h=false&lat=22.987727913536983&lng=-1.40625&t=1&z=3&l=col2%3E%3E1&y=2&tmplt=2> that
> visualizes the political finance transparency scores of 31 countries from
> Global Integrity’s extensive research on anti-corruption mechanisms and the
> integrity of national institutions. For more details or similarly
> disappointing country scores from previous years see GI's full research<http://www.globalintegrity.org/report>
> .
>
> *Global Integrity Scorecards on Political Finance Transparency, 2011
> (Covering 31 countries)*
>
> ****
>
> *Party and Campaign Funding Trends*
>
> And Global Integrity is not the only strict critic here. According to an
> analysis based on the most recently updated IDEA database<http://www.idea.int/publications/political-finance-regulations/index.cfm> that
> catalogues political finance laws from around the world, only “53% of the
> countries require reporting from both parties and candidates” and in more
> than 25% of the states that do so, “there is no requirement for this
> information to be made available to the public”. And in the age of rapid
> technological development, online reporting is not on the radar of even the
> most progressive countries. But when it comes to the level of citizen's
> trust in reporting and oversight mechanisms, aka practice, that's when the
> picture gets the worst.
>
> Transparency Intrernational research<http://www.transparency.org/whatwedo/pub/2012_regional_policy_paper_2_political_party_integrity_more_accountable_mor> on
> the National Integrity Systems (NIS) of 25 European countries* *demonstrates
> how political parties in even European countries "suffer from the lowest
> levels of integrity registered among all national institutions and sectors.
> Such high levels of perceived corruption can be linked to the increasingly
> negative influence that unregulated party and campaign financing have had
> on countries’ political processes and decisions." In other words,
> regardless of how simple or sophisticated their political financing
> regulations are, countries around the world are equally failing to
> effectively regulate undue influence in decision-making and while being
> quite apt at priding themselves on every single dataset they release, looks
> like politicians do not consider political funding as ripe for reform. How
> can we tell?
>
> *Hardly Any OGP Commitments Around Party and Election Funding *
>
> We had a look at the OGP commitments and out of the 48 countries with delivered
> commitments to the Open Government Partnership<http://www.opengovpartnership.org/countries>,
> only 6 (!) had a hint at regulating the flow of money into politics. This
> does not necessarily mean that other non-OGP states cannot undergo
> important changes but the trend is obvious. And honestly there's no reason
> to believe that countries without working freedom of information
> legislation or a strong culture of accountability would be eager to
> introduce radical transparency laws.
>
> If we put aside our inherent skepticism for a second we might also assume
> that some of the national action plans at the OGP simply forget to mention
> ongoing reform initiatives around political finance transparency. However
> there's enough evidence to believe that besides Albania, Croatia, Georgia,
> Latvia, the Netherlands and the Ukraine, no other national governments have
> anything to say (or do) about their more or less broken party and election
> funding systems.
>
> *High Time for Reform*
>
> Is there a way out? It will definitely be a painfully slow process leading
> our politicians out of the trap of systematic corruption which is in many
> cases essential for their survival. Still, we believe that the rising tide
> of government transparency creates an important opportunity to push for
> better disclosure norms and laws in political funding. The financial crisis
> already evoked a never-before-seen level of citizen outrage and demand for
> more transparency generally. With proactive disclosure of public interest
> information becoming a default, why should party and campaign funding be an
> exception? The rapid development and increased use of technology can create
> global momentum for political finance transparency reforms in a way that
> has been impossible before, and yes, this is indeed the perfect time to
> start pushing together for better systems.
>
> In the upcoming months, we want to map the social, political and
> technological landscape of political finance transparency around the world,
> with a special focus on disclosure trends. Sunlight is planning to collect
> and blog more about the best practices on technology-based monitoring tools
> and we also have a handful of good examples on how to use technology and
> crowd sourcing methods in environments where access to data is very
> limited. Ultimately we want to combine our efforts with other activists and
> advocates throughout the world, and help shape the way the public accesses
> information about how elections are paid for and how parties are financed.
> Stay tuned for our upcoming posts!
>
>
> --
> Júlia Keserű
> International Program Coordinator
>
> 1818 N Street NW, Suite 300
> Washington, DC 20036
> (1) 202-742-1520 *280
>
> [image: Sunlight Foundation] <http://sunlightfoundation.com/> [image:
> Sunlight Foundation on Facebook]<http://www.facebook.com/sunlightfoundation>[image:
> Sunlight Foundation on Twitter] <http://twitter.com/sunfoundation>[image:
> OpenGov on Reddit] <http://www.reddit.com/r/sunlight> [image: Sunlight
> Foundation on YouTube] <http://www.youtube.com/sunlightfoundation> <http://sunlightfoundation.com/feeds/latest/>
>  _______________________________________________
> open-government mailing list
> open-government at lists.okfn.org
> http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/open-government
> Unsubscribe: http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/options/open-government
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> open-government mailing list
> open-government at lists.okfn.org
> http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/open-government
> Unsubscribe: http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/options/open-government
>
>

-- 
Júlia Keserű
International Program Coordinator

1818 N Street NW, Suite 300
Washington, DC 20036
(1) 202-742-1520 *280

[image: Sunlight Foundation] <http://sunlightfoundation.com/> [image:
Sunlight Foundation on
Facebook]<http://www.facebook.com/sunlightfoundation>[image:
Sunlight Foundation on Twitter] <http://twitter.com/sunfoundation>[image:
OpenGov on Reddit] <http://www.reddit.com/r/sunlight> [image: Sunlight
Foundation on YouTube] <http://www.youtube.com/sunlightfoundation>
<http://sunlightfoundation.com/feeds/latest/>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/open-government/attachments/20130731/9aaa8f83/attachment-0001.html>