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CIAO DATE: 4/00
Foreign Policy
Democracy for Sale: Campaign Finance Goes Global
Jane Bussey
This abstract is adapted from an article appearing in the Spring 2000 issue of FOREIGN POLICY magazine.
No politician, no matter how consolidated his power, no matter how secure his place in history, is safe once lurid stories of fundraising transgressions hit the nightly news. Helmut Kohl. Ehud Barak. Bill Clinton. Silvio Berlusconi. Nelson Mandela. Boris Yeltsin. All have seen their legacies sullied and their parties shaken by campaign finance scandals.
Money and politics have been intimately linked since democracy's earliest days, and campaign finance scandals are exposed and forgotten with dismaying regularity. But a recent rash of scandals in rich and stable democracies reveals new forces at work.
In the last decade, much of the world has seen a blurring of borders, ideologies, even national identities. At the same time, the emergence of vast new wealth around the globe, tethered to no single nation, has become a weapon in buying influence and a force for local and global corruption. Campaign finance, know-how, and even skullduggery have gone global, while national mechanisms for regulating them have failed to keep pace. Globalization has changed campaign finance and changed it irreversibly.
Shady campaign financing, whether it involves foreign or domestic money, can skew election results in favor of the biggest fundraiser and open the way for criminal elements to influence government policy. The underwriting of campaigns by high rollers threatens to rig the free market of ideas, eroding the public's belief in the power of the individual vote and its faith in the fairness of democracy itself. Indeed, if the current epidemic of scandals goes unchecked, capitalism may prove to be as insidious an enemy of democracy as communism was.
How to Buy Friends and Influence Countries
A dangerous and costly symbiosis has emerged in the last 10 years, to the detriment of democracy and good government. Economic liberalization of trade and privatization of state-owned assests in countries throughout the world has created a new tycoon class with cash to burn and a million good reasons to get governments in their pockets. At the same time, as the role of ideology has waned and office seekers worldwide have moved toward the center of the political spectrum, elections have turned into increasingly expensive image campaigns to woo voters, tempting many politicians to be less discriminating in their money chase.
As globalization turns the business world ever more transnational, investors must seek political approval for their ventures in more than one or two capitals. Campaign contributions, in such cases, ride roughshod over ideology and often turn on global investment and trade decisions thousands of miles from the elections they influence. Once upon a time, the Kremlin would have held sole sway over the construction of a Caspian Sea pipeline. Today, that pipeline will cross several nations and require combined investments from a number of companies. The incentives to buy influence in Moscow, Washington, and a string of locales in between are as plentiful as the opportunities.
Paying for It
The single most expensive item in any campaign bill is often television time, now a necessity in electoral persuasion. But costs have burgeoned because elected officials must run a permanent campaign, with increasing costs, if they expect to stay in office.
Selling a brand name is expensive. The bill for the 1980 U.S. presidential and congressional election season came to $1.2 billion. Twelve years later, the tab had nearly tripled: $3.2 billion, including $500 million for the presidential campaign alone. Officially, Yeltsin's re-election cost just under $3 million, but reliable estimates place the true price tag at $600 million. In Mexico's 1996 legislative elections, the price came to $17 per vote.
The Bucks Stop Where?
The political will in both emerging and established democracies to bring about real change is often sorely lacking. Dozens of proposals to reform campaign finance languish in legislatures around the world. Countries such as Japan, the United States, and Germany have tried to guard against fundraising abuses through judicial measures: public control, legal regulations, and accounting requirements. Many countries emerging from communist regimes or military rule have embraced democracy without establishing either public financing or rules that guarantee free, fair, and believable elections. Meanwhile, candidates are seldom punished at the polls for failing to carry out pledges to reform campaign finances. Public indifference allows shady donors and politicians to escape accountability. Campaign finance abuses, in turn, damage democracy's credibility and breed public indifference.
It is popular to clamor for campaign finance reform, less popular to make real proposals, and still less popular to see them through. But the global political and economic trends that have given birth to scandal in the world's capitals of democracy show no signs of slowing down. If illicit financing can threaten to bring down Germany's Christian Democratic Union juggernaut, then no party, no leader, no country is immune. Democracies are not going to collapse over a scandal, or two, or ten. But neither will the ideal of one person- one vote-remain intact. And that is not a principle to relinquish quietly.