Funding equality: democracy, money and political representation
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Funding equality: democracy, money and political representation Chiara Fiorelli1
© European Consortium for Political Research 2020
Book reviewed: The Price of Democracy: How Money Shapes Politics and What to Do about It Julia Cagé (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020) 464 pp., ISBN: 9780674987289 “One person, one vote” is a core meaning of electoral democracy. However, this democratic model, based on the pillar of electoral participation, has been challenged in recent decades evidenced in the decline in turnout rates; the rejection of political parties as collective intermediary actors; and talk of the “cost” of politics for the public coffers. The funding of political parties and electoral campaigns has attracted the attention of scholars for years. From a theoretical point of view, the leading perspective in this field of research has been based on the cartel party model (Katz and Mair 1994, 1995). Katz and Mair’s organisational approach focuses on the dependence of political parties on state support and subsidies that progressively increases parties’ detachment from civil society (also see Scarrow et al. 2017). Another essential strand of literature in this area of research refers to the legal framework of political financing regimes. This strand provides useful comparative works for those dealing with democratic competition (see, for instance, Nassmacher 2009; Koss 2010; Norris and van Es 2016). These studies investigate the relations of political parties to their funding systems, examining the impact on the distribution of political power (Mendilow 2012) and queries the motivations of donors (McMenamin 2013). Cagé’s book focuses on the role of money in democratic competition, emphasising its risks for social inequality. The book offers scholars, stakeholders and the general public a different perspective on the risks of inequalities connected to the funding of democracy. Cagé identifies three categories of citizens: the ordinary citizen—the majority who participate in democratic life especially, but not exclusively, during elections; the activist citizen—those who are members of political * Chiara Fiorelli [email protected] 1
University Sapienza, Rome, Italy Vol.:(0123456789)
C. Fiorelli
associations; and the generous donors or plutocrats—those with time and money to be heard (p. 9). The author recognises a potential danger for democracy stemming from the increasing role (and power) of the latter category when she highlights an oligarchic drift in the politics of the early twenty-first century (p. 13). Through three sections, and using a comparative and historical perspective, Cagé outlines the development of political funding regulatory systems in Western Europe and North America. In the first section, Cagé offers an assessment of the increasing costs of democracy and democratic campaigns through an analysis of candidate-level data (for France and the UK) and party-level data (for Germany). Measures such as tax writeoffs, tax reliefs and tax reductions on political donations are
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