Very often, political
parties and/or candidates are required to report their income and/or
expenditure to the Electoral Management Body or other authority, or to have
their accounts audited by the electoral authorities. [1]
If this is the case, the accounts are then often disclosed to the public after
auditing. In reporting and disclosure regulations, there is a need to strike a
balance between the wish by outsiders to know (transparency)
and the wish by donors and recipients to maintain their private sphere (privacy).
There is a bigger need to respect privacy in countries where the risk of
harassment against donors to specific parties is greater. In societies with a
low level of public trust in political parties, there is usually a higher
demand for transparency and consequently more public disclosure of finances.
Reporting and public
disclosure can serve many purposes ranging from assisting the election authorities
to ensure that money is not accepted from illegal sources; to being an
empowerment of voters in deciding which party or candidate they want to vote
for. The main dividing line in reporting and disclosure regulations is whether
or not the information gathered is made available to the public.
In cases where the
information is made public, it is often argued that voters have the right to
know where the political parties and candidates got their money from, to be
able to make an informed choice on Election Day. If the reporting information
is made available to the public it can:
If a political party or
candidate has received large amounts of money from an individual or a company,
and is later seen to initiate or vote for decisions that would directly benefit
the donor, public disclosure gives media and private citizens a better chance
to question the grounds for the decision.
- Give taxpayers
information about what public funds have been used for
In cases where political
parties and candidate campaigns are wholly or partly financed by public means,
disclosure gives taxpayers information about what the money has been used for.
- Serve as an
alternative or complement to prohibitions and ceilings
Laws and regulations
prohibiting certain sources of funds or expenditure items – and laws on
ceilings and limits on how much a party or candidate can raise and/or spend –
can be difficult and costly, or even impossible, to enforce. Public disclosure
can either be an alternative to these laws or serve as a complement. By making
the sources and expenditure known to the general public, voters can clearly
indicate what they think is acceptable by not voting for parties and candidates
who have received their funds from dubious sources.
There are four primary principles
underpinning successful regulation on public disclosure. The information
provided to the public needs to be: [2]
Accurate, which means that the
enforcement agencies need to have the means to audit the reports and
ensure that they give a correct picture of the finances of the party or
candidate’s campaign.
- Timely, in the sense that
information on election expenditure published long after the elections can
neither affect the voters’ choice on election day, nor serve as a good
basis for reasonable sanctions.
- Include the right amount of
detail, and not overburden the reader with a level of detail that is not
useful. If the reports are to be read by an informed public, they need to
be presented in a way and with a level of detail to make them
understandable to a non-professional.
- Publicly available, not only on
public display in a government office in the capital during office hours,
but rather published in a way that gives the maximum number of citizens
the chance to read the reports. Depending on the country, this may mean
publication in main newspapers or on the website of the enforcement agency
(EMB or other) or even posting summaries on public notice boards.
[1] See also: Transparency International & The Carter Center
(2007). The Crinis Project: Money in
Politics, Everyone’s Concern. http://archive.transparency.org/regional_pages/americas/crinis
[2] Karl-Heinz Nassmacher (2003):
"Monitoring, Control and Enforcement of Political Finance
Regulation", in Austin, Reginald and Maja Tjernström (2003): Handbook on
Funding of Political Parties and Election Campaigns, International IDEA,
Stockholm, p. 144.
