Abstract
This chapter outlines the logic of the initial case selection for the work that follows. There is then a brief pause for a methodological reflection with regard to the measurement of party income and the errors that have been made in previous scholarship. Following on from this, the justification of Denmark and Great Britain is completed. I then outline the reasons behind utilising the elite interview and how this method will be triangulated with an analysis of party accounts, grey literature and other media sources.
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Notes
- 1.
Another issue with the measurement of party finance is that, as no party funding regime is the same, each country has differing controls and regulations—particularly to do with transparency—meaning it is hard to compare and contrast among countries.
- 2.
In this category he analyses France prior to 1988 but also includes Italy up to 1974.
- 3.
Available at http://www.politicalpartydb.org/, accessed 18/07/2017.
- 4.
Unsurprisingly, the van Biezen and Kopecký findings and the Casal Bértoa findings are much the same with exceptions for those not included in their respective datasets.
- 5.
A difference between this work and the work of the PPDB is the classification between Great Britain and the UK. This is because Northern Ireland has separate party funding rules to the rest of the UK. For example, in Northern Ireland trade unionists have to opt in to affiliating payments to political parties and donations and, for reasons relating to the Irish peace process, were not subject to the same transparency obligations as those in the rest of the UK. This legislation has since been changed and donor names do now need to be published, but this will not be backdated to before July 2017 (BBC News 2017a). It is for this reason that this research refers to, and analyses, the party funding regime of Great Britain, not the UK as a whole.
- 6.
The data collected for this research project in the British case was from Electoral Commission spending returns and in the Danish case from a report to the Justice Ministry (Ministry of Justice 2015) and returns provided to the Danish parliament.
- 7.
This might also explain the larger discrepancy between the PPDB and SMI when it comes to state subsidies. This was classified as ‘other income’ by the Ministry of Justice, as such this percentage was 12.44 in this return. The data collected in this project represents the ‘official stories’, it is data collected from accounting returns. As there are no common accounting standards within (and across cases) there is a certain amount of self-coding that occurs which explains some variance. These differences may further reflect certain different reporting practices. Therefore, using data such as this will never be ideal but in this case I concur with the PPDB team that ‘the best available option is to stick with the official story’ (Webb and Keith 2017: 67).
- 8.
Of course, there are no identical party funding regimes save for the level of state finance so the closest resemblance will have to do.
- 9.
Although this also chimes with work undertaken by Whiteley (2014).
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Power, S. (2020). Analysing Corruption and Party Funding. In: Party Funding and Corruption. Political Corruption and Governance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37580-5_4
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