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ARTICLE IN PRESS JPGQ1109_proof 6 August 2007 1/21 + MODEL 1 2 3 Political Geography xx (2007) 1e21 4 www.elsevier.com/locate/polgeo 5 6 7 8 Money and votes: A New Zealand example 9 10 Ron Johnston a,*, Charles Pattie b 11 12 a School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, Bristol BS8 1SS, UK 13 b Department of Geography, University of Sheffield, Sheffield S10 2TN, UK 14 15 16 17 Abstract PROOF 18 19 The role of money in elections is attracting considerable contemporary attention, because of the poten- 20 tial for corruption of electoral and political systems. In part, this concern is based on a belief that money 21 matters in those elections, that how much parties and candidates spend on their campaigns can influence 22 how many votes they win. Tests of this belief suggest that this is indeed so, especially in the case of chal- 23 lengers’ spending. The New Zealand electoral system offers an excellent arena in which to test these ideas further, because its adoption of MMP allows examination not only of the impact of spending on changing 24 patterns of party support over time but also of patterns of switching between parties in the two components 25 of each election. Analyses of the 2005 general election there provide substantial support for the argument 26 that money matters, especially for the country’s smaller political parties. 27 Ó 2007 Published by Elsevier Ltd. 28 29 Keywords: Elections; New Zealand; Campaign spending; Split tickets 30 31 32 33 34 The role of money in elections is a topic of considerable contemporary interest in a range of 35 countries, because of concerns about potential corruption of the political process by vested in- 1 36 terest groups. These concerns have increased in recent years as a result of a number of trends. 37 38 * Corresponding author. 39 E-mail addresses: [email protected] (R. Johnston), c.pattie@sheffield.ac.uk (C. Pattie). 40 1 In the UK, for example, claims in mid-2006 that major donors to the Labour party had been offered peerages (seats 41 in the House of Lords, which is part of the legislature) in return for their support (in many cases, through loans that did 42 not have to be reported to the Electoral Commission because of a loophole in the relevant legislation) stimulated a public 43 inquiry into political funding, only 10 years after an earlier report from the Committee on Standards in Public Life which led to the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000 and the establishment of the independent Elec- 44 toral Commission (see Ewing,UNCORRECTED 2007). 45 46 0962-6298/$ - see front matter Ó 2007 Published by Elsevier Ltd. 47 doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2007.07.002 Please cite this article in press as: Johnston, R., Pattie, C., Money and votes: A New Zealand example, Political Ge- ography (2007), doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2007.07.002 ARTICLE IN PRESS JPGQ1109_proof 6 August 2007 2/21 + MODEL 2 R. Johnston, C. Pattie / Political Geography xx (2007) 1e21 48 Political parties are no longer mass organizations with large memberships prepared not only to 49 subscribe to the parties’ funds but also to work for them, especially in mobilisation activities 50 during election campaigns. To replace the lost members, parties have to find alternative sources 51 of income and adopt other forms of campaigning, with the latter increasingly expensive because 52 of the costs of professional staffs and media advertising. To raise the needed money, many 53 parties have turned to wealthy donors, who are prepared to make large contributions e though 54 often with an expected quid pro quo in terms of access to politicians and potential influence 55 over policies. 56 The potential for wealthy donors (both individual and corporate) to gain influence over the 57 political process has generated considerable interest in the regulation of party finance. Some 58 countries have had regulations in place for a considerable time e as with the UK’s Corrupt 59 and Illegal Practices Act 1883 e but for a variety of reasons these are proving no longer suf- 60 ficient to deal with the contemporary situation. Those promoting reform have thus explored 61 a range of means for regulating party funding so as to remove any appearance of corruption 62 (a term used in the landmark US Supreme Court judgement regarding the regulation of federal 63 political funding in the 1976 case of Buckley v Valeo). As a result, extensive regulatory regimes 64 are now in place in some countries (as with the UK’s Political Parties,PROOF Elections and Referen- 65 dums Act 2002 and the USA’s Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002) and some have also 66 introduced state funding for political parties (as in Canada: see the overview in Ewing, 2007). 67 Three types of regulation have been introduced: 68 69 1. Disclosure, whereby parties and candidates are required to disclose, usually to an indepen- 70 dent electoral commission, both their sources of income (above a certain threshold) and 71 their expenditure; 72 2. Regulation, whereby how much individuals and corporate bodies can donate to a party or 73 candidate (or to a third-party interest group) in a given period is restricted to a maximum 74 sum, and/or with party and candidate expenditure similarly capped; and 75 3. Public funding, whereby the state provides funds for political parties and candidates, sub- 76 ject to conditions and constraints. 77 78 Although not a sequence that has been followed in all cases, the second has usually been 79 introduced because disclosure merely illuminates the problem of an ‘appearance of corruption’, 80 by indicating a party or candidate’s degree of indebtedness to specified donors. Regulation is 81 intended to constrain such potential influence and also, by limiting how much parties and/or 82 candidates can spend, remove the need for large donations and the equivalent of an ‘arms 83 race’ in the growth of expenditure as parties perceive the need to outspend opponents in the 84 quest for electoral victory. Such regulation has often proved difficult to implement, however. 85 Further, by limiting parties’ and candidates’ ability to appeal to donors for funds, regulation 86 has constrained political activity perceived as necessary to democratic operations e parties 87 and candidates need to get their messages to potential voters. (In some cases, such information 88 dissemination is covered by constitutional protections of the freedom of speech and expres- 89 sion.) Hence public subsidy has been introduced in some countries, ensuring that bona fide con- 90 tenders for power have sufficient funding for their electoral purposes and removing any 91 potential for them to becomeUNCORRECTED dependent on (and thus open to influence from) interest groups. 92 (For an example of this sequence in Que´bec, see Massicotte, 2006.) 93 There are many issues relating to regulation regimes and public funding, and how these 94 might be established and made operational in a way that benefits democracy (as illustrated Please cite this article in press as: Johnston, R., Pattie, C., Money and votes: A New Zealand example, Political Ge- ography (2007), doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2007.07.002 ARTICLE IN PRESS JPGQ1109_proof 6 August 2007 3/21 + MODEL R. Johnston, C. Pattie / Political Geography xx (2007) 1e21 3 95 in a recent collection: Ewing & Issacharoff, 2006). Only one is considered here e is money 96 effective in elections? The underlying assumption in much of the debate is that it is e that 97 the more money that candidates and parties spend on their election campaigns, the better their 98 performance. (For an early review of this literature, see Johnston, 1987; for a recent evaluation 99 of spending on constituency campaigns in England, see Johnston & Pattie, 2007.) Such evi- 100 dence sustains the arguments of those who want campaign spending regulated: expenditure 101 caps will limit an individual’s ability to influence an election outcome through donations to 102 parties and/or candidates. This alone may not be sufficient reason to limit and/or cap donations, 103 of course, since individuals may seek to buy influence, by providing funds for other party ac- 104 tivities than electioneering. Against it are counter-arguments that any regulation and the provi- 105 sion of state funding e which in almost all cases is conditional on candidates and/or parties 106 limiting their reliance on other founding sources e is an unwarranted intrusion into the dem- 107 ocratic process.2 Some of the most recent US cases in this area e such as McConnell v FEC 108 (2003) e have been concerned with balancing these two arguments: is a limitation of the 109 free speech right justified in the larger public good because it removes the potential for corrup- 110 tion of the electoral and political system? 111 There is a large literature on the impact of campaign expenditurePROOF on election outcomes, with 112 mixed findings (see, for example, Jacobson, 2006). In general, although with a number of ex- 113 ceptions (some reflecting different methodological strategies for testing hypotheses that money 114 matters), this research has shown that spending by challengers has more of an impact than 115 spending by incumbents. (Such findings are largely derived from studies of countries with 116 first-past-the-post electoral systems as deployed in UK and US elections.) The New Zealand 117 case provides a particularly valuable opportunity to extend this body of work, because its elec- 118 toral system and regulated party funding regime allow two sets of analyses of the impact of 119 campaign spending to be undertaken.