Comment by mantas
1 day ago
Not 100% what OP proposed, but in my country political funding is extremely capped. Compared to US, campaigns here are tame to say the least. But overall it’s for the better IMO.
1 day ago
Not 100% what OP proposed, but in my country political funding is extremely capped. Compared to US, campaigns here are tame to say the least. But overall it’s for the better IMO.
And most party funding comes from the government which favours party which are already in power? Not that this is a horrible system but it does have rather obvious downsides.
e.g. that doesn't seem to be working that well in Hungary or Turkey and presumably quite a few other countries. Banning or severely limiting external funding or support makes it rather easy for politicians with authoritarian policies to keep their grip on power.
You win the election, you tweak the system to make it easier for you to win next time, you get more funding and your opponents less. Rinse and repeat and you can weaken the opposition to such an extent that you can stay in power more or less indefinitely. That's what Orban or Erdogan are doing.
Another option is you spend a lot of money, win, then change the rules to ban or limit external funding so that nobody else can do that to challenge you.
So far government does u-turn after each election so it looks like there’s enough safeguards to make sure formula stays sane. Maybe it would be a problem if private citizen funding was fully banned. But now that’s allowed with a cap to avoid fraud.
And in our case the alternative is Russian money making it into politics. Which is exactly what could lead to issues.
My criticism is of banning campaigning, it's a an engineers solution to a complex web of problems they don't understand.
Well that isn’t a very compelling argument unless you get a lot more specific.
Here’s a narrow critique, you don’t understand that limiting campaigning privileges name recognition which is something only existing officials or celebrities will have.
In a representative system where you vote directly for candidates and not parties like in the US you need to know who is who and what they support.
Banning campaigning hurts challengers to the status quo.
I could keep picking your naive suggestion apart but this is I believe sufficient evidence that you haven’t done your homework.
Start with the fact that it's impossible and will only benefit the candidate that best bends the rule or is able to blatantly break it without repercussions.
Yes, severely capping funding, or even banning all private funding and giving all campaigns a fixed stipend off public money, is probably one of the most important things you can do for the health of a democracy.
It has nothing to do with what GP was suggesting of "banning campaigns" lol
> giving all campaigns a fixed stipend off public money
How do you allocate that? Surely you can't give anyone who asks the same amount. So you favour parties which are already entrenched. Of course that has quite a few upsides but it doesn't seem like an inherently democratic system.
In worst (of course not unavoidable) you also might end up with indirect equivalent of what your re trying to ban, e.g. private media companies with a lot of resources that are biased towards certain candidates influencing public opinion (without crossing the legal boundaries) or those already in power using the state media to do the same.
e.g. in Hungary most funding comes from the government. How did that work out for them?
By allowing uncapped funding, you’re just giving a lot of power to big money. Which is not exactly democratical either.
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But essentially it’s very close. The result here was that private campaigning was rediced a lot. Debates are mostly state-organized. Big portion of posters are on state-designated special billboards. There’re still some ads on all sorts of media, but there’s less of them and they’re less intense. Private events are next to nonexistent. Compared to US, I’d say campaigning, when put on a spectrum, is closer to being banned than the other side.