Corruption linked with political funding is no different from other forms of corruption when it comes to the sharp variations in public opinion to which it creates. Long periods of indifference alternate with sudden, high profile crises, with the demand to 'chuck out the rascals' heading the government or the ruling party, and with calls for reform. It is, in fact, difficult to isolate those reforms which have started as anti-corruption initiatives since so much legislation concerning the financing of elections and political parties has been introduced as a reaction to scandals. Certainly, corruption and suspected corruption relating to political financing has been the main source of discontent with the working of democracy in recent years in most of the advanced industrialised nations of the Group of Seven, i.e. Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United States. The possible exception in this list is Canada.
An understandable and common reaction to scandal has been to establish some form of enquiry, followed by new legislation.
In Italy, the corruption crisis of the early 1990s led to a referendum on the public financing of political parties and to demands for a change in what was seen by the public as a deeply flawed system. It is open to speculation that what the Italians wanted most was change - any change. Had there been little public funding of political parties, the reform pressure might well have taken the form of a demand for the introduction of such public subsidies.
In the United States, the demands for reform came in the decade of the Watergate Affair. The new public subsidies for presidential campaigns and the controls on donations failed to solve the problems of rising costs and apparent sleaze. The fund-raising methods employed in the 1996 presidential election campaign by President Clinton and vice-president Gore have led to further legal investigations and to demands for new laws. The main difference between the 1970s and the 1990s is that disillusion with the reforms of the 1970s has led those who are dissatisfied with the rules to be more cautious about suggesting legislation as a panacea for corruption.
In Britain, public worries about possible payoffs for contributors who have made large, unpublicised payments first to the Conservatives and then to the Labour Party led to an investigation in 1993 into the funding of political parties. This was conducted by the Home Affairs Committee of the House of Commons. In 1997, a prestigious extra-parliamentary committee on Standards in Public Life (the Neill Committee) launched an enquiry into the same subject. This is expected to lead to recommendations for significant new legislation.
In France, the interplay of scandal and new legislation has been recorded in the works of Yves-Marie Doublet.
As a generalisation, scandals have led to public enquiries. These enquiries have led to reforms, especially to demands for greater disclosure of political contributions and for the public financing of elections and parties. However, a further generalisation is that the reforms have sometimes proved a disappointment and have failed to prevent later scandals connected with politicians' search for funds. There are a number of possible reasons for this. One of the most important is that infringements of the law have all too often been poorly investigated or not investigated at all. Moreover, the determination of the authorities to bring prosecutions against wrong-doers has left much to be desired in some countries.
The most effective anti-corruption initiative relating to political financing is, therefore, one of the most difficult - namely systematic and fearless enforcement.
The problem of enforcement arises from a combination of two things. First, as seen in a number of entries, politicians and important donors are often able to find ways to evade the law in ways that are not obvious. It is rare to discover party bagmen in the act of receiving bundles of forbidden cash. It is difficult to establish that favourable decisions by a government are a payoff for a contribution. The Republican administration in Washington in the 1970s claimed that the decision about milk susbsidies was not linked with promises of contributions; the West German courts in the 1980s felt that the prosecuting lawyers in the Flick Affair were unable to prove that massive, discretionary tax relief to the Flick Concern had been connected with its huge political donations; in Britain, the Blair government's decision to press for an exemption for Formula One motor racing from a proposed ban on sponsorship by the tobacco industry was claimed to have been made independently of a donation of £1 million received from the leading member of Formula One.
Second, the political pressures against mounting prosecutions tend to be very large indeed. After all, political financing involves some of the most powerful figures in any society and few prosecutors will venture to make them a target unless there is strong public pressure to do so.
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