Party Finance Reform as Constitutional Engineering? The effectiveness and unintended consequences of Party Finance Refor
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Party Finance Reform as Constitutional Engineering? The effectiveness and unintended consequences of Party Finance Reform in France and Britain Ben Clifta and Justin Fisherb a Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK. E-mail: [email protected] b Division of Politics and History, Brunel University, Uxbridge, Middlesex UB8 3PH, UK. E-mail: [email protected]
In both Britain and France, party funding was traditionally characterized by a laissez faire approach and a conspicuous lack of regulation. In France, this was tantamount to a ‘legislative vacuum’. In the last two decades, however, both countries have sought to fundamentally reform their political finance regulation regimes. This prompted, in Britain, the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000, and in France a bout of ‘legislative incontinence’ — profoundly transforming the political finance regime between 1988 and 1995. This article seeks to explore and compare the impacts of the reforms in each country in a bid to explain the unintended consequences of the alternative paths taken and the effectiveness of the new party finance regime in each country. It finds that constitutional engineering through party finance reform is a singularly inexact science, largely due to the imperfect nature of information, the limited predictability of cause and effect, and the constraining influence of non-party actors, such as the Constitutional Council in France, and the Electoral Commission in Britain. French Politics (2005) 3, 234–257. doi:10.1057/palgrave.fp.8200082 Keywords: France; Britain; party funding; constitutional engineering; unintended consequences
Introduction Ideas about ‘constitutional engineering’ have been widely applied to electoral system reform (Taagepera and Shugart, 1989; Sartori, 1997), but much less to reforms in party funding and political finance, despite the fact that such changes profoundly affect the relative strengths and advantages of political parties. While it is true that all constitutional engineering is an inexact science, it is surely particularly true in an area of democratic institutional change that
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has received relatively limited attention. Much work on party funding has focused on the origins of reform and the rationale underpinning reforms (see e.g.: Clift and Fisher, 2004; Hopkin, 2004; Scarrow, 2004; van Biezen, 2004). While these are clearly important aspects of party funding, this can lead to neglect of an equally vital concern — namely the impacts of party funding reform. It is these impacts that are the focus of this article. We analyse here the cases of France and Britain. Both are mature advanced (post-) industrial democracies, each with majoritarian party systems. Prior to party finance reforms, both had similar laissez faire traditions and unregulated arrangements for party funding. In the case of Britain, until February 2001 when the Political Parties, Electi
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