Small Money Donating as Democratic Politics

Since 2008, the number of people in the United States making small monetary donations to political causes, both within and beyond electoral politics, has skyrocketed. While critics of “big money” in politics laud these donations because they are small, proponents of small-scale democratic political action eye them suspiciously because they are monetary. Neither group interrogates whether the monetariness of these donations might be a source of their democratic potential. Building on Wendy Brown’s conceptual distinction between monetization and economization, I argue that small-money political donations are potentially democratic not only because they are small, but also because they are monetary. More specifically, the mobility, divisibility, commensurability, and fungibility of money help make small-money political donations potentially democratic, by making them potentially accessible, non-intrusive, and collective. Money is the coin of the economic realm, but it can also be a currency of democratic politics.

A regional head election’s political corruption and new styles of clientelism

Intense competition in the regional head election (Pilkada) has implications for the increasing costs that candidates have to prepare to win the competition. The high cost in the regional head election makes many regional heads, when elected, commit political corruption and practices that are more adapted to the situation, namely the new styles of clientelism. This study aims to determine the shift in the relationship between political corruption and clientelism and to see new forms of clientelism. The approach used in this research was a literature study. Documents were selected using an application from the Publish or Perish database. The results of this study indicate that first, the power of money in politics in Indonesia creates a significant dependence on economic power, which influences a high level of political corruption. Second, there are two new styles of clientelism, including buying and selling votes and patronage in the bureaucracy. This paper concludes that the various modes of political corruption and new styles of clientelism that occur underline political vulnerabilities at the local level due to the broad elaboration of regional authority discretion.

Political Finance Assessment of Fiji

Fiji, being a transitional democracy with fragile institutional and regulatory mechanisms, is susceptible to the negative effects of money in politics. Yet for a very long time, regulations related to the funding of political parties, candidates and election campaigns, commonly known as political finance, were largely absent in the South Pacific country. Biased political appointments, corruption in the awards of public procurement tenders, cronyism and capture by business elites are some of the challenges that Fiji is vulnerable to, which thrive in an environment with insufficient institutional and legislative regulation of political finance. This report, which is the first of its kind, has undertaken a systematic study of the political finance regulatory framework in Fiji using an internationally developed, and tried and tested, analytical framework. The study is part of a larger International IDEA initiative to review political finance systems in selected countries in order to advance an evidence-based global policy debate on money in politics.

Framing Issues of Ex-Prisoners, Vote Buying, and Winning Teams: Evidence from Pilkada of the Palangka Raya City

This manuscript specifically explores the dynamics of the Pilkada of Palangka Raya City in 2018. As with the simultaneous regional elections in Indonesia in general, there are still problems related to the practice of vote buying, network of winning teams and strong patronage. This is a determining factor in a candidate's victory, even though he was once labeled a prisoner. We observed a phenomenon in the Pilkada of Palangka Raya City; that having high popularity and strong political clientelism cannot help a person that is labeled an ex-prisoner to attain victory. Our study is complemented by a case study approach with a holistic analysis method. We observed and interviewed key informants in order to obtain some data related to the theme. Results show that the ability of the winning candidate’s team to frame and counter frame the candidate as an ex-prisoner who gives cash to former fellow inmates, succeeded in helping the other candidate to win the Pilkada in the Palangka Raya City. We found that the implementation of the frame and counter frame theories was successful in the Pilkada context. This method of framing and counter framing is very effective in producing regional leaders with integrity and clean records and in instilling rationality in voters to reject corrupt leaders. Empirically, the limitations in framing these issues have not completely eliminated the pattern of giving money in politics.

How the Workplace Affects Employee Political Contributions

How important is the workplace for employees’ political donations? Contrary to research on workplace political mobilization, existing work assumes that most individual donors contribute ideologically. I link donations of employees and Political Action Committees (PACs) from 12,737 U.S. public companies between 2003 and 2018 to show that 16.7% of employee donations go to employer-PAC-supported candidates. I investigate the dynamics between employee and PAC donations within firm–legislator pairs over time and find that both rank-and-file employees and executives contribute more dollars to company-supported politicians. Firm–employee donation alignment is stronger on powerful and ideologically moderate politicians with high value for the employer. Results from a difference-in-differences design further show modest changes in the partisan composition of employee donations after swift changes in the partisan donations of corporate PACs. The results suggest investment-related rather than ideological motives for alignment and highlight the importance of corporations for money in politics.

How Might Digital Campaigning Affect the Problems of Political Finance?

This lecture deals with the intersection between three sets of challenges, each of which constitutes an existential threat to democracies across the world. The first is linked to money in politics, which poses the danger not only of ‘policy capture’ but also, in worse-case scenarios, of state capture by monied interests. The principal question addressed by this lecture is poised at the meeting place between these sets of challenges: How might digital campaigning affect the problems of political finance? Also integrated into the analysis is a third set of challenges: those which arise from the Covid-19 pandemic. This lecture reflects on how the pandemic might shape the impact of digital campaigning on the problems of political finance. Follow the lecture for the conclusion and read also the paper for more details.

What Do Americans Know about Campaign Finance?

Chapter 2 establishes a baseline by reviewing public opinion concerning money and politics, pre– and post–Citizens United, focusing on what Americans know about money in politics and campaign spending. On the one hand, given that citizens are typically not well informed about politics, it should come as no surprise that they do not know all that much about candidate spending or campaign finance. On the other hand, the public is not completely off base with respect to its sense of money in politics, and this basic intuition is perhaps even sharper in the post–Citizens United era. The data suggest that while Americans know a little bit about campaign finance, there is no systematic correlation between the regulatory environment of the state and how much people in that state know about campaign finance.

The Appearance of Corruption

Chapter 1 describes the Supreme Court’s reasoning on campaign finance regulation, free speech, and political campaigns and then offers a chapter-by-chapter plan for testing the key assumptions underlying the Court’s reasoning. The behavioral model of the Buckley v. Valeo (1976) links individuals’ perceptions of corruption to their decisions to participate politically, hypothesizing that the greater an individual’s perception of corruption the less likely that person is to participate in the political process (e.g., vote) because of an erosion of trust in government. Based on these assumptions, the Court accepts the mitigation of corruption as the (lone) compelling state interest for limits on money in politics. Chapter 1 outlines how the authors will empirically explore the behavioral model posited by the U.S. Supreme Court in its 1976 Buckley v. Valeo decision.