Campaign and Party Finance Monitoring

In 2003 and 2004 the Justice Initiative focused on political corruption issues, particularly on combating corruption in the financing of political parties and electoral campaigns. In many countries, private interests have bought off politicians to distort the regulatory environment and government policy to their own benefit. The financing of political parties is particularly susceptible to such influence: it is expensive to operate a party, particularly during an election campaign, and public funding—when available—tends to be insufficient. A growing dependence of politicians and parties on contributions from a small number of powerful economic actors alienates parties from the electorate, and contributes to mounting cynicism about the political system in general.

In some countries, however, NGOs have successfully brought the issue of campaign finance to public attention and helped achieve regulatory reform. The United States offers some useful examples, where NGOs have focused on tracking the relationship between donations and political decisions, inviting scrutiny of questionable dealings from voters and regulators alike. Yet U.S. NGO practices rest on extensive public disclosure requirements, often lacking in other countries. Where strict regulations do not exist, NGOs have drawn attention to the deficiencies of regulations governing party and campaign finance, by monitoring expenditure instead. Campaign spending, for example, which is visible and trackable, may indicate a minimum of total campaign donations. By demonstrating the high levels of funding required to run an election campaign, these NGOs have managed to generate a public demand that funding sources be disclosed and greater transparency and accountability rules be imposed on party financing.

Originating in Latin America, this approach has been applied with some success in Central and Eastern Europe, although the limitations of this methodology in different national contexts—for example, in Slovakia, where campaign advertising is banned from electronic media altogether—has highlighted the need to account for other categories of spending and to develop a more nuanced methodology flexible enough for different regulatory frameworks.

The Justice Initiative has documented and systematized these existing NGO practices as well as current expertise and scholarship to develop a multi-dimensional approach that allows NGOs to monitor campaign financing in a way that best reflects their own objectives and national circumstances. The Justice Initiative methodology provides guidance on monitoring both sources of income—to the extent that existing disclosure requirements permit—and context-specific expenditure.

The Justice Initiative’s major innovation, however, has been to turn a spotlight on the often neglected issue of public resource abuse for electoral purposes. Working in Russia, in partnership with Center for Anti-Corruption Research and Initiative/TI Russia, the Justice Initiative has been exploring ways NGOs can monitor the political abuse of “administrative resources” in addition to the more common forms of campaign finance corruption. A joint project monitoring administrative resource misuse in Russia’s 2003 parliamentary election campaign has yielded important lessons on how best to track this spending, and has served as a pilot for developing a more detailed methodology in 2004.

The Justice Initiative methodology is published as a handbook in print and electronic form, and will be further disseminated through regional workshops and in-country monitoring projects in cooperation with local partners.

For general resources on monitoring political party and campaign finances, click here.